Apr 182011
 

I see and get asked very regularly why sometimes in digital printing you get a different colored box around drop shadows, transparencies and sometimes masks.

The reason is because sometimes the printer rip software allows a different “rendering intent” to be selected for images (bitmap) to vector (spot colours) and quite often the rip software will even default these to be different settings for the 2 things.

Normally a photograph is better (more detailed) when selecting “Perceptual” intent, and a vector or spot Colour will be more accurate with “Relative Colorimetric” intent so these will usually default this way.

Where people get caught with this common problem is that a drop shadow is actually calculated as a bitmap (pixels) but the area around it that was selected as a spot vector (solid color) and if you have the two rendering intents set differently then the Colour for the area with the drop shadow will be mapped differently to the vector – hence creating a box surrounding the drop shadow.

The Fix:
Simple – change the rendering intents to be the same and then re-rip and reprint it again. If this was the problem then the box will vanish.

Within Flexisign Pro (Production Manager) and Photoprint rip this can be found in the job, or default job properties in the “color management” tab by selecting the “advanced” button. Here you will see a list of color spaces and rendering intent options.

Within Onyx Postershop or Productionhouse rip, this is changed within your quickset options (if you are not using custom quick sets then change the default quickset).

Within Roland Versaworks this can be found within the job color settings (I need to confirm this because I am writing this from memory – I will come back to this post and update as I remember to).

Other rips will have similar color workflow settings and options – usually an area like “Colour workflow” or “input profiles”. The key word to look for is “intent” or “rendering intent”

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