Green Tint on Reflective White

[kellogg]

We recently got a job to apply a digitally printed reflective white vinyl on a vehicle. It seemed like a simple job, but our customer is not happy. The print consist of black gradient against the white/silver reflective background. Somehow there is a very faint green tint built into the print. You can see it as the black lightens up in the last 25% of the print (approaching 0% black). We asked around and someone suggested it was caused by the laminate we are using, but we can see the tint before we apply the lamination. We then started making color adjustments in the adobe illustrator where we set the CMYK to 100% black. This eliminated the green tint, but we lost a lot of details in the print. The black gradient is now much shorter before it switches to 0% black. Has anyone experienced this problem and found a solution to eliminate the green tint? We haven't yet tried different brand reflective vinyl, made any other CMYK adjustments in the illustrator or tried different profiles in our RIP program. Here's our printer setup: Onyx RIP, Mimaki JV3 printer using their solvent ink, illustrator & photoshop program. By the way we are using all six color inks in our printer.

 

[axis]

Maybe this...

My printer is a four color, not six, but I had something like this happen once. In my printer's control panel there is a setting for "black=cmy" or something similar that tells the printer to use cyan, magenta and yellow to make black. I toggled it to the off setting, it went back to using the "K" cart for black and the green tinge was gone.

 

[2B]

We had the same issue with the "green tint"
Our set-up is Roland VS-640, Versa-Works, CorelDRAW.

You will have to go and change your print commands to do gray-scale only and then DO LOTS OF TESTING for the gray-scale.
If you do not want to test on the reflective, get some clear material/lamination and test on that

 

[kellogg]

Do you by chance recall where you went in the menu to adjust those settings? We looked for it and weren't able to find it.

 

[jfiscus]

How big is the print job?
The client may be accustomed to Thermal Printed vinyl (ie; Edge Prints) which are a true black on white reflective.

I get different colors from my solvent printer by just choosing different resolutions, for a nice B/W photo I have to print on the "bi-directional high-speed" setting...

 

[kellogg]

It isn't just the reflective. I actually have the issue on regular print jobs as well. We generally use the 3M 180 control tac vinyl. If I want to print greys they are usually green tinted unless I accommodate for it in Illustrator. We use Onyx for the our rip program. If I set the file to grey scale, it prints perfect greys but if I have it set to color the greys are green tinted along with blacks.

It would be nice to have a permanent fix if it is as easy as adjusting the setting on the printer.

 

[gabagoo]

Is this not an issue for all printers as far as using profiles and rich blacks?

so I know from experience that a 50% black will not get me the grey i want to see but something either greeny or browny

 

[kellogg]

Someone dropped us a line and suggested we look at a color management system called Alwan. I wanted to see if anyone at this forum knows or heard anything about this program.