Gradient white print out of Rasterlink??

[White Haus]

Until ONYX decides to figure out how to get us printing cmyk+w on our new UCJV we're stuck using rasterlink. I'd like to meet the people that created this software and have a few words with them....but I digress. Honestly it's insulting using this software after using Versaworks for 11 years and Onyx Thrive for 5.

95% of what we do is reverse printing cmyk images and backing them with white ink. We've been able to (painfully) make that work with the plates and all that but now need to print a gradient white behind some spot graphics.

I've tried using the Mimaki swatches in both Illustrator and Corel and neither will allow me to overprint behind/above a cmyk object, let alone add a gradient to the white.

Normally I could just create a plate from the white file but as far as I can see this will just be a solid percentage of white.

Does anyone have any experience with this in Rasterlink? I'm out of ideas and patience.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Solventinkjet]

I'm not an expert in this particular area so there may be a better way. I'm pretty sure Raterlink won't do white gradients as they come natively from Illustrator or Corel. However my first thought was to make a normal gradient with black and white and then run the color halftone filter on it in Illustrator. That will give you a bitmap halftone gradient that you could use as the white plate. Just my .02.

 

[White Haus]

I'm not an expert in this particular area so there may be a better way. I'm pretty sure Raterlink won't do white gradients as they come natively from Illustrator or Corel. However my first thought was to make a normal gradient with black and white and then run the color halftone filter on it in Illustrator. That will give you a bitmap halftone gradient that you could use as the white plate. Just my .02.

Thanks for this! Gives me another route to explore. I'm not super familiar with the Adobe halftone filters but we did have a tech show us how to create some cool halftones in Photoshop recently.

I think I've made some progress....

If I create a gradient in Illustrator using yellow as the color, then in Rasterlink change the job attribute to "mono color" then tell it to replace yellow with white/white, it seems to work. (Converts the file to white, and has successfully printed a white gradient) Last test will be outputting my cmyk objects as their own file then create a composition w/ cmyk & white elements and see if they'll overprint. I still find it frustrating that you need to go through all these steps and have multiple files for one print. Both onyx (Spot1) and versaworks (RDG_WHITE) have made it so easy to print white, I guess I got spoiled.

I tried playing around with Rasterlink tools and using those swatches and they will come in as white, but not with layers/overprints. I suppose I could try setting up my gradient with that spot color and eliminate the whole yellow to white conversion.

I'll be printing this test file on Monday....fingers crossed.

If anyone else has any tips for cmyk+white printing from Rasterlink I'm all ears.

 

[IPreferPC]

This is how I achieve white gradients out of rasterlink 6. After a LOT of frustration...

Illustrator:

Make a rectangle, or shape... make it solid yellow (or whatever).
Make another shape over the top of it.
Apply a gradient to the top shape, with one side being 100% opacity and the other being 0%.
Select both items.
In the transparency docker, hit the top right menu button and 'Make Opacity Mask'.
Play around with the gradient location and amounts to taste.

Then in rasterlink, find the CMYK value (0,0,100,0 Yellow in this case) and apply a W100W100 colour swap to it.


Have fun out there~

 

[artifacture]

It works just as you outlined. Set the gradient to (in our case, Cyan), output it as a separate file. Import into RL, select mono color, and replace cyan with white. Then composite with the CMYK file and print. I've also done it as a raster image. I brought it into Photoshop, set it to grayscale, then used duotone to apply cyan to it. It also printed as expected. I read a lot of much more complicated methods, but for as dumb as RL is on so many things, it does this correctly.

 

[Philw]

Until ONYX decides to figure out how to get us printing cmyk+w on our new UCJV we're stuck using rasterlink. I'd like to meet the people that created this software and have a few words with them....but I digress. Honestly it's insulting using this software after using Versaworks for 11 years and Onyx Thrive for 5.

95% of what we do is reverse printing cmyk images and backing them with white ink. We've been able to (painfully) make that work with the plates and all that but now need to print a gradient white behind some spot graphics.

I've tried using the Mimaki swatches in both Illustrator and Corel and neither will allow me to overprint behind/above a cmyk object, let alone add a gradient to the white.

Normally I could just create a plate from the white file but as far as I can see this will just be a solid percentage of white.

Does anyone have any experience with this in Rasterlink? I'm out of ideas and patience.

Thank you in advance.

Finally someone singing my own tune, listening to the happy UCJV300 posts on here was making me wonder whether I was the only one constantly unfavourably comparing Rasterlink to Versaworks. As far as I know it can't be done. Only way I came up with was, as already mentioned here, to create a half tone for both the white and the colour plates. I often print at percentages of white less than 100 which allows you to put down a less opaque layer but there doesn't appear to be any way to do a gradient with the special colours.

 

[Goatshaver]

Thanks for this! Gives me another route to explore. I'm not super familiar with the Adobe halftone filters but we did have a tech show us how to create some cool halftones in Photoshop recently.

I think I've made some progress....

If I create a gradient in Illustrator using yellow as the color, then in Rasterlink change the job attribute to "mono color" then tell it to replace yellow with white/white, it seems to work. (Converts the file to white, and has successfully printed a white gradient) Last test will be outputting my cmyk objects as their own file then create a composition w/ cmyk & white elements and see if they'll overprint. I still find it frustrating that you need to go through all these steps and have multiple files for one print. Both onyx (Spot1) and versaworks (RDG_WHITE) have made it so easy to print white, I guess I got spoiled.

I tried playing around with Rasterlink tools and using those swatches and they will come in as white, but not with layers/overprints. I suppose I could try setting up my gradient with that spot color and eliminate the whole yellow to white conversion.

I'll be printing this test file on Monday....fingers crossed.

If anyone else has any tips for cmyk+white printing from Rasterlink I'm all ears.

Yes this sounds like it would work to me. This is how I handle my white files right now with white and clear.

I'm also waiting for Onyx to sort things out on the 330 but if you still can't run the 300 that doesn't give me a lot of hope for seeing the 330 running through Onyx.

 

[White Haus]

Yes this sounds like it would work to me. This is how I handle my white files right now with white and clear.

I'm also waiting for Onyx to sort things out on the 330 but if you still can't run the 300 that doesn't give me a lot of hope for seeing the 330 running through Onyx.

This thread is from 4.5 years ago when we first got the machine. We've been running it with Onyx without issues since then, but haven't played around much with profiles since we're not printing white very often.

Built a few custom profiles, mainly use a 600x600 CMYKLcLm profile for 99% of our printing.

 

[Goatshaver]

This thread is from 4.5 years ago when we first got the machine. We've been running it with Onyx without issues since then, but haven't played around much with profiles since we're not printing white very often.

Built a few custom profiles, mainly use a 600x600 CMYKLcLm profile for 99% of our printing.

I didn't even catch that....these old resurrections got me.

 

[Kemik]

Create a gradient in illustrator using 1 color only, C, M, Y, or K. save that as a seperate file.
Bring it into RL.
Select that file, go to the INFO tab.
Change Job Attributes to "MONO COLOR"

Select your source color and change it to White.

Hit okay and create your layers.

You can do the same thing to create Clear gradients.