Adobe Community: Separations

Currently Being Moderated

1. Mylenium,

Feb 15, 2012 3:52 AM in reply to Bavix

Report

Not sure what you are saying here. A separation is for all intents and purposes just a greyscale representation of the ink's intensity/ saturation and distribution on the plate. The actual rasterization is applied by whatever is interporeting the file on the other end, i.e. a RIP hardware/ printer. If the printer supports custom screening angles, it will read the meta info attached to the objects and rasterize them accordingly, if noit, it will simply use its default screen.

Mylenium

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

2. Bavix,

Feb 15, 2012 4:10 AM in reply to Mylenium

Report

I've been trying to print actual halftone separations as a postscript file. I've tried using multple PPDs, the host-based separation option, and halftone settings but the postscript file only gives me a multipaged grayscale document.

This used to work just fine, but for some reason, it recently changed. I'm not sure if it was when I upgraded to CS5 or the new MacOS.

Thanks,

Bavix

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

3. Mike Gondek,

Feb 15, 2012 7:39 AM in reply to Bavix

Report

Sounds like you were expecting to get each seperation in it's respective color not in grayscale. The tags are still there for color information, so there is nothing wrong with your separations being in grayscale, sounds like you are having trouble with controlling the angle.

Something has changed in either how you are viewing you PS files, or how you are creating them.

How are you previewing the PS files? On the scitex for example you could preview seperation in either grayscale or their own channel, there was a settign to change. really helped on yellow plates which are hard to see against white.

How exactly are you making your PDFs, need to be able to trace your exact steps?

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

4. Bavix,

Feb 15, 2012 1:36 PM in reply to Mike Gondek

Report

Nope, I have no expectation to see anything except what I've been seeing for several years now—halftone separations. I, and an art department of almost 20 people, have been viewing (in Preview and Acrobat) and printing (to several different laser printers) postscript files as seps with the correct frequency and angles. This has been an integral step in our proofing process that somehow changed with either the latest version of Illustrator or MacOS. We have had to change our print settings to rely on the rip for our frequency and angle but our print process rely needs to be Host-Based. Unfortunately, Host-Based no longer yields the correct frequency and angles but gives us grayscale.

It's my understanding that the postscript settings changed somehow in either the program or the OS. How do I change or override the Adobe Postscript printer settings to allow Host-Based halftone separations, like have been possible for many many years.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

5. rc@luxyachts.com,

Jun 21, 2012 10:20 AM in reply to Bavix

Report

I'm having this exact same problem. I'm on a Mac running Lion (OS 10.7.4), working in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and trying to print color seps to our Epson Stylus Pro 9900. Since I can no longer print to PDF (as with older versions of Illustrator), I print to Adobe PostScript File using my Epson 9900 PPD. I then select Output on the left-hand sidebar menu, which gives me the list of inks available to print. I'm outputting positive film for tshirt screen printing, so for the ink I need I'm setting the Frequency to 40 and the Angle to 17.5. I then save the postscript file, put it through Distiller, and print to the Epson from the resulting PDF.

When the film is finally out (this is a lot of time and too many steps, IMHO), the screened areas of ink are not halftone dots, they are solid greys. This means that the Frequency and Angle settings I input for the postscript file were ignored when printed. Is this a PPD issue? A driver issue? An Illustrator issue? An operating system issue?

HELP!!

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

6. Larry G. Schneider,

Jun 21, 2012 10:27 AM in reply to rc@luxyachts.com

Report

What happens if you Save a PDF directly from AI, open the result in Acrobat and do your seperations from there?

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

7. rc@luxyachts.com,

Jun 21, 2012 10:41 AM in reply to Larry G. Schneider

Report

If I Save As a PDF file from Illustrator and then open in Acrobat Pro, I can't print seps and I can't change screen frequency or angles.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

8. Larry G. Schneider,

Jun 21, 2012 10:58 AM in reply to rc@luxyachts.com

Report

So you can't use this

when printing from Acrobat?

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

9. rc@luxyachts.com,

Jun 21, 2012 11:29 AM in reply to Larry G. Schneider

Report

Nope. No option for seps in my dialog box series...

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

10. Larry G. Schneider,

Jun 21, 2012 11:59 AM in reply to rc@luxyachts.com

Report

Do you have any RIP software for this printer? I looked at the literature and can't seem to find out if this printer has PS3 support.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

11. rc@luxyachts.com,

Jun 21, 2012 12:32 PM in reply to Larry G. Schneider

Report

No, we have no RIP software. Never needed it until the CS5 + Mac OS 10.7.4 combo came along. I'm trying to figure out whether I can expect Adobe to release an updated PPD that will fix this, or whether now I have to go buy RIP software because Illustrator no longer functions as it did previously.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

12. Larry G. Schneider,

Jun 21, 2012 12:43 PM in reply to rc@luxyachts.com

Report

OK, let's try this. From AI do Print> and then select the Printer button in the lower left. When the new dialog comes up is there a PDF button in the lower left of that dialog. If there is, then do you have the option shown here. This has replaced the old print to PDF in OSX10.6x and 10.7.x.

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

13. rc@luxyachts.com,

Jun 21, 2012 1:12 PM in reply to Larry G. Schneider

Report

When I use that method and try to save as a PDF, I get "The Save as PDF options in the Printer dialog are not supported." I can save as a postscript file by that method, but I can do that right from the main print dialog box. :-(

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

14. Z_Print_41,

Dec 7, 2012 8:49 AM in reply to rc@luxyachts.com

Report

I've been trying to figure out this same issue. Have you figured anything out since you first started this post?

|

Mark as:

Currently Being Moderated

15. rc@luxyachts.com,

Dec 18, 2012 12:53 PM in reply to Z_Print_41

Report

No news on my end. I'm calling Adobe support again and will post if I get any good news, such as, "We heard you and made a new PPD - download it here!" This is maddening. Not an issue on PCs, of all things.

|

Mark as:

Illustrator

Separations

Feb 15, 2012 12:14 AM

More Like This

Bookmarked By (0)

Answers + Points = Status