I've got a love/hate relationship with my Mimaki UJf-6042. Help me love her again?

[tyfisk]

Hello from TN fellow Mimaki owners! I'm about to drive myself crazy trying to figure out how to print the file that I've attached.

I'm wanting it to print white for the text and inside of the red circle in this simple design. If I print using "valid pixel" it will not work because I understand that it recognizes the #ffffff as transparent. However, if I print using "whole image" it prints white where I want it to, but it also prints white everywhere there is transparency in the .psd file.

We print all of our files in EPS files as recommended by our Mimaki dealer. I've tried different file formats other than .eps files to see if that would help with the issue and no success. I know this has to be a simple thing that I'm missing here.

Can you help me with this?

I know it has to be possible because on Mimaki's site they've printed pens with white text and it shows up.

How can I get it to print the white inside of the circle & text, but not in the transparent areas?
​

This was done printing the "Whole Image" and prints white everywhere there is transparency.

This was printed using "Valid Pixel" and it omits the transparency and the #FFFFFF white.

Thanks guys!

Here's the .PSD file for you to try out if needed:
View attachment White Test.psd



P.S. We love this machine and use it daily, but find this to be an ANNOYING limitation. I know this has to be a simple click of the box that we're missing somewhere. We do love our Mimaki and use it daily for our normal printing with great success. But we we try and work with white in some of our designs it becomes a pain in the *** again. Looking forward to meeting some fellow UJF owners as the community seems to be small. My main beef with Mimaki is that they do not have the same sort of guides/tutorials/community that we're accustomed to with Roland. Hopefully we can drum that up here. Thanks!

 

[tyfisk]

So good news is we've finally figured out how to print the white.

Bad news is it only fixes our problem sometimes.....


We can create a CMYK file in Illustrator and then import the file into Rasterlink. In the "Color Replacement" section we can define that a color can be replaced with whatever other color we choose when printed, in our case white. That's awesome for files that we create in house and work up from scratch. The issue comes in when a customer sends me a .jpg with white within in the image that needs to be printed.


Here's a simple example. Let's say that I need to print this file and have the white within the two raster images show up within the circle, but the white outside of the circle needs to be transparent. How would we go about doing this? The color replace feature will not work in this instance since the two pictures are not vector files.

 

[artbot]

for me, white ink and rasterlink was always a breeze. but then i always sent the file as a .tif. perhaps you are sticking to this .eps rule too closely.

there used be rasterlink white ink tutorial videos on the internet. haven't seen them for some time.

 

[tyfisk]

for me, white ink and rasterlink was always a breeze. but then i always sent the file as a .tif. perhaps you are sticking to this .eps rule too closely.

there used be rasterlink white ink tutorial videos on the internet. haven't seen them for some time.

Thanks artbot! We'll give the TIF file a try.

 

[J Hill Designs]

I would imagine you need to add a 'white' channel to the .tiff file

 

[artbot]

one thing i saw in a tutorial that i thought was very odd. don't remember if i tried it (been years), most likely did. was that you would "shift/click" two entries in the rip??? this would cause, when set up correctly, both ripped images to print simultaneously. sorry, not much help. surely there's someone on this site that remembers these videos and/or downloaded them.

 

[artbot]

i just found all these quicktime tutorials about how to use white ink in rasterlink if anyone is interested.

 

[Brink]

Re: i just found all these quicktime tutorials

Sure I'd like to take a look.

 

[Brink]

Bump

Bump

 

[artbot]

pm'd you a few days back. these videos are on a spare drive but i can look them up in a day or so. maybe upload them?

 

[Brink]

Bump

I would still like to see those. Been watching the Inbox and this thread. BTW I did reply to your PM before you posted here for me to check the PM. Would be cool to see these vids though.