I have been fighting the iGen for two years now. Just when I think I have the answers they change the questions.


My main issues are:

Printing spots with any kind of transparency.
(Spots are washed out or if I get the setting right I get the YDB around the shadow)

iGen skews colors to purple
(Blue being next to impossible to attain.)

What color space should I use in Indesign(CS3)? How do I get the iGen to output what I see? Providing I have calibrated my monitor.

Please help the best you can. I'm in the process of reading other posts. Some of it is over my head. I am trying!

First, be sure to read the "design for digital" book Xerox put out. I can send you the pdf of it if you can''t find...

Second, Transparency is everyones thorn. But, as long as you understand it it shouldn't be an issue. Be sure all pantone colors are named "C" and are legit pantone names. "U" uncoated pantone colors will print washed out looking as they are trying to simulate printing on an uncoated stock, so regardless of stock be sure you are using "C" coated pantone colors. You MUST flatten transparencies and there are several things you must watch when doing this. A) you cannot flatten process and spot colors together (ie:black only drop shadow over a spot), you must convert spots to process prior to flattening. Delete ICC profile prior to flattening (MUST!). C) If you are using acrobat 8 you can use the preflight and set it to acrobat 4.0 profile and preflight will do autofix and flatten transparencies or you can do it a few other ways as well. You will get a box that may show on screen where the transparency effects are taking place but they will not show in the print. Some customers don't like seeing these boxes so we sent them the pdf proofs prior to flattening so they do not see them, a little risky but they don't leave us with much choice and it hasn't been a problem as of yet...

Color space is kind of up to you.. I find that Using RGB tend to give you richer color. I usually go by what is coming into indesign and leave it there.

BLues will go purple not much you can do to help it other than plan for it. You can get nice blues but generally if you get blue images they tend to go gain red. THis is natural for monitor to print but, the Igen does make them a little reader. The new Gracol color profiles for the DocUsp help considerably. If you have not got the latest software yet I would schedule it (have them install the patch at the same time). Also RGB blues seem to be better to manage..

Got to run, hope this helps!

Dale Zahnke

Which front end do you have? Dale's right if you have a DocuSP. If you run the Fiery or Creo Spire then its a bit different but same issues.

Xerox did announce at Drupa that they hope to have the PDF Print Engine in the DocuSP by the end of 2009. I haven't heard a solid timeline from Fiery and no idea when Spire will.

But that is the ultimate solution, until then you will have to flatten and check every job against the screen to make sure you caught everything.

If you have Prinect or Prinergy as a pre-press system, both include refine processes to flatten for you and both to a really good job of solving this issue about 99% of the time.

As for the color, the igen3 is a tough beast to tame when it comes to blues. Keep the developer fresh, fuser new and don't print less then 7% of any separation in coverage by sheet and you will see improved color stability. Also, unless it has changed, you can adjust the toner purge settings to a higher quality (I think it was like 130 or so) which will force the machine to purge toner faster and should improve color stability at the sacrifice of speed.

3rd party color tools like CGS's Press Matcher can help control the gamut by reducing the gamut to what can be controlled without significant sacrifice to color.

DocuSP is what we have with the iGen.

Yeah. I think I'll take you up on the pdf. tpatterson at /////////// automateddirectmail.com

I broke up my email to avoid spam bots.

I have read it but haven't seen it in a while. I remember reading about gradients and how to put them at angles when possible to avoid banding. Lots of stuff like that in there. I just remember it not having answers to my transparency problems.

I don't know if you guys will believe me or not. But I had the iGen printing a black drop shadow over a pantone spot. That's why I found this place. It stopped working. I opened up the file for a reprint. The my indesign printer set up was still the same. Only this time it started screwing up again. I get on here and read through only to find that what I was doing wasn't possible. They might have changed something in the que to mess up my glitch.

I don't understand why there isn't a definitive set of guidlines for printing from Indesign or Quark to the iGen, or GMC Printnet for that matter. One set up that prints everything. Spot on spot with transparency or what ever crazy colors and effects. If it's obvious there is a color shift to purple then why not adjust for that? I just don't get it. How is it practical to have something with so many issues?

You have to turn all color settings off to get the iGen to print the pantone digital color chips? But you need color settings on if you have a CMS in place?

Bit of a rant and thanks for the quick reply. I hope to get all my issues solve. I would be happy to create a pdf of my knowledge once everything is worked out.

Dale,
Is there any way I could get a copy of that? If so please send it to sales"at"lorisprinting.net, I would really appreciate it!