New to flexi - color issues.

[struthmuffin]

We've been using onyx for years, its been pretty dependable, but find it slow and missing some nice functionality that is available in flexi... but having a hell of a time getting it going. Second month now and finding issue after issue.. calibrating has been a nightmare.. refuses to communicate properly with our hp's .. it will not linearize with the onboard spectro.. but we got around it by scanning the prints with an i1isis we had.

Heres the current color issue.. that I can't understand.. we place pdfs in production manager.. now we have a pdf all vector.. some layers of gradient.. a pantone blue.. the print from onyx all solid blue is the same shade.. from flexi.. some blue is full.. some is slightly faded. All CMYK, all vector from the source file...

A side question I guess... is everyone flattening their files before they hit flexi? We've seen some transparency issues which are scary..

 

[Snydo]

I would highly recommend flattening .pdf files before sending them into flexi, strokes and gradients will usually be wrong if you do not.

 

[bob]

I would highly recommend flattening .pdf files before sending them into flexi, strokes and gradients will usually be wrong if you do not.

That's because there is no standards,none, nada, zip, zero, for transparencies** and gradients and every package rolls their own. Ergo, you make these sorts of things into bitmaps before you start exporting and importing here and there.

**While gif files do support a kind of transparency convention, it's really not the same thing at all.

 

[ams]

Why use Flexi? I find it very hard to use. Once you go with Corel Draw X7, you'll never go back.

 

[struthmuffin]

Why use Flexi? I find it very hard to use. Once you go with Corel Draw X7, you'll never go back.

We are first a print shop second a sign shop. So all our graphics are created in Adobe programs. Flexi/Onyx is just the output mechanism. I have seen others mentioning coreldraw nd I will investigate but it seems like it would just be a program you print from not a rip.

Flattening has been a non issue with onyx. We have been oututting unflattened PDFs for a couple years now with no issues. But we now are doing more vinyl cutting as well and flexi is much simpler for that. Also onyx can't seem to handle our HP z3100 ink combination.

At the very least I will try out the flattening suggestion. Easy to do. Then maybe I'll go so far as to rasterize but I'd rather not have to do that.

I appreciate the input!

 

[struthmuffin]

Flarrening did solve that particular problem by the way. Thought I would update. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Correct Color]

"But we now are doing more vinyl cutting as well and flexi is much simpler for that. Also onyx can't seem to handle our HP z3100 ink combination."

A couple points if you'd really rather use Onyx:

First is that most of the features that people tend to think of as making cutting easier in Flexi are actually available in Onyx Layout tool. It would depend on your version whether you have it available to you.

Second is that I've profiles plenty of Z3100's in Onyx. There's no problem with the inkset at all. In fact it's poiisble in Onyx to profile that printer to take full control of its capabilities much more so in Onyx than in Flexi. So my guess is it's just a settings issue that's making whatever issues it's having.