Printing in grey scale & vectoring

[Pro Signs & Graphix]

Outline - excuse the pun, but outlines are the leading cause of ribbon breakage.

KPC - Forget the cost of the machine, just for a moment.

The advantage with the inkjets is that the ink is much cheaper than the ribbons. Even an inkjet can and will print with CMY, instead of 100K. When this does happen, either from file creation or equipment operation, the cost is still almost trivial - unlike when this happens with Roland's PC, as you now see. (And inkjet owners still voice the same concerns over waste)

Like many of us said, the learning curves are steep, almost straight up. Can you pick up on it? - sure you can, but unfortunately a five minute answer cannot do that. It will take many many hours, and lots of material to get there

 

[Outline Graphics]

Here's some info that may or may not help

http://www.rolanddg.co.za/bobnotes/Tips_Tricks/ColourManagement.pdf

 

[Whit]

If you can vector first,,, the spot color
should fall where you want !!!
Course this is out of my field,, but stands
to reason individual images would print
as individual images instead of process !!!

 

[iSign]

With your system being a thermal device, my mind wants to compare your needs to the capabilities of my Gerber thermal system, even though I know of the vast differences between them. While I know a lot about the differences, I'm not all that knowledgable on the PC60. Like so many before me have stated, I too had one in my shop. I got rid of it in a week. So I may be wrong on this, but my guess would be that it would by tricky at best to run the job the way you describe it, however I think there is a possibility to consider that hasn't entirely been mentioned.

Fred zero'd in on the main question.... can a rastor image (like your .jpg) be assigned to print with just any one single ribbon color?
In Omega, this is possible & the results when using a black ribbon on any color image are similar to xeroxing a color photo on a black & white copy machine... nice photographic gradiations, just no color.

If that is possible, then the second, possibly more difficult task is assigning the full color motorcycle to print in full color, right in the center of the newspaper printed in one color. While this is able to be done in Omega (& more easily now with 2.5) it may be difficult or impossible on your system... but there is always a workaround...

Going back to before the first printers were available... multi-color work has been done with vinyl for 2 decades by applying one layer of cut vinyl upon another. There is no reason to not consider this IF you find a way to print the newspaper... just print the motorcycle as a seperate decal & add it on.

 

[Gino]

Honestly, I didn’t take the time to thoroughly read all of these posts. Your answer could well be in one of those somewhere, I just don’t know. However, since you still seem to have the problem and have stated that this thing isn’t as easy as you first thought, I thought I’d put my 2 cents in here for you. I just ran a test on mine, to be sure of my answer. There’s many ways of getting the results you want. It simply depends on your knowledge of color and how a spade is not a spade anymore. Whether or not you use spot colors or process colors will sometimes have a bearing on your results also.

The easiest way is to set your colors in manually and get the grey scale you wanted using the software and not the ripping program. Then set your spot color whatever it is [unless you have several spot colors… then just add all of them]. Next, add a cut line of either a designated line shape or color… or both. Send this all to the rip, choose either CMY or YMC and indicate your spot color. [You can use CMYK or YMCK… that’s up to you]. The printer will print the entire grey scale and then go back and print your spot color. Finally, it will go back and cut everything you have selected.

The next way is to do a two-step process. This involves cutting/pasting and resending the image, which this machine is totally capable of doing. We do it quite often. This method will only use black [or any other spot color you choose} for your grey tones, even if there are blends or fades in there and then resending it to pick up on your spot colors and cutting at the very end. There are some other ways of achieving the results you want, but it involves out-thinking the rip program, which I don’t think you can handle at this point if you can’t get the thing to print and cut normally.