Illustrator color/resolution help

[jbennett]

I am new to designing in Illustrator. I did a design for a digital print and was very pleased with the results with only a few minor (or what I hope are minor) exceptions. How can I get the orange color in my design to more closely resemble a flourescent orange ( I said more closely, not exact. The yellow loooked great.)? Also I sent the file to the guy that I am going to sub my printing to. It is a very large jpg image and looked good, but at the 72 dpi, it could have stood to have been slightly more clear. Every time I tried to export as 100 dpi file, it says that not enough memory available. Are actual hardware limitations my problem, or is it the program configuration? The computer has 768 MB of Ram and over 200 GB free hard drive space. All help is greatly appreciated. I just need a little help getting started here.

jbennett

 

[Rod]

Try either swatch libraries, or printint color charts

I am new to designing in Illustrator. I did a design for a digital print and was very pleased with the results with only a few minor (or what I hope are minor) exceptions. How can I get the orange color in my design to more closely resemble a flourescent orange ( I said more closely, not exact. The yellow loooked great.)?

• In Illustrator, go Window menu >> Swatch Libraries and see if there is some inspiration there.
• Alternatively, do a forum search for previous "chart" topics. Some software provide a function to automatically generate custom and preset color charts, or you can obtain standard chart files that you can print. Then just use the printed charts like a lookup table for the hues that your printer can reproduce.

Regards,

Rod

 

[3CGraphics]

if you have the pantone color you want - there are many free conversion from pantone to hex charts that you can use to get close to your color - then select the color you wish to change - click on the color swatch in the tool bar and replace the color it is with the new hex (or RGB or CMYK) value from the conversion chart. Remember that when matching a color you have many variables, largest is probably your monitor that unless properly calibrated will not show true print colors and even when properly calibrated can still cause grief due to the diffrent nature of how a screen works and how printing works (color wise I mean)

as far as exporting the file, most times I try to export at 300 ppi for printing unless its like a billboard that will never be viewed up close. You are running at the very bottom as far as RAM - really need a minimum of 1gb although illy will run at 512 - just as you see it can cause trouble when working with big files

 

[iSign]

does your print guy have illustrator? If so, maybe he can do the final export as a .tif for you since you are so underpowered in ram. (or go buy more ram)

Also, there are limits to the color gamut of possibilities from a cmyk printer. Flourescent Orange is the best example I know of if I had to describe a color I can never hit with my printer.

Does your print guy have some color charts he has printed on his printer to assist with showing you colors that he knows how to reproduce? (this issue may even be another good reason for supplying him with the illustrator file instead of the 100dpi .tif) A lot of us do print charts like that so if he has one, you can quickly see how close you can (or can not) get to the orange you had in mind.

The only print job I ever lost from a sample not matching one color was a bright orange I couldn't hit.

 

[vid]

Why a TIF ...or JPG from Illustrator? If it's vector art, why not do as iSign suggests and send the AI ... or for that matter an EPS or PDF?

As noted, you're not going to hit a flourescent color with CYMK printer, but you can make the orange vibrate with contrast --- purple outline maybe? ouch!

 

[jbennett]

Thanks guys. These are the things that I needed to hear. I think that the color chart is an excellent idea. I think I will also go ahead and try to get some more ram for my computer. Will illustrator not use hard drive memory for exporting if not enough system RAM is available? Just wondering. Does anyone have the CMYK values for the closest thing that they have found to flourescent orange? I appreciate all of the good help. Also the graphic is very large (around 27" x 144" print size).

jbennett

 

[thewood]

You won't be able to reach fluorescent orange. But to find out what oranges you can produce, try starting with 0,10,100,0 (CMYK) and add Magenta in 5-10 percent increments. From there you can tweak the CMYK values to dial in some nice oranges.

 

[Mason]

Thanks guys. These are the things that I needed to hear. I think that the color chart is an excellent idea. I think I will also go ahead and try to get some more ram for my computer. Will illustrator not use hard drive memory for exporting if not enough system RAM is available? Just wondering. Does anyone have the CMYK values for the closest thing that they have found to flourescent orange? I appreciate all of the good help. Also the graphic is very large (around 27" x 144" print size).

jbennett

The previous advice on color correction is spot on(no pun).

In Illustrator, go to Edit/Preferences/Plug ins and Scratch Disc...

You have two options under the Scratch Disc option, they are for Physical drives, you need set them for the drives you want illustrator to use to process your files.

Example; My machine has three hard drives, the first or "Primary"scratch disc is set to my "D" drive, when "D" cannot handle the file alone it overflows to my Secondary Scratch disc "F" you can also tell it how much of each drive you want to use, a percentage of the alloted memory.

Check that, if it tells you that your "C" drive is set as both, change it.
you should see an increase in performance.