I have been having some problems with a few things since the last softwar upgrade that I have been working out with Xerox. Is anyone else having problems with Trapping / Edge Enhancement / RGB Enhancement / Layout impositions?

We have layout causing 1/2" bands of color variations.

Trapping causing a hallow effect aroung text.

Edge enhancement causing Ghosted images to come up very dark and over enhancing..

RGB enhancement causing RGB images to go very dark...

Let me know if you are having strange things happening..

Thanks!

Dale Zahnke

Is this with variable data elements?

No it is on static jobs and some variable too..

Was it an upgrade in place or a new load of the software completely with a clean format?

If memory serves me, which it doesn't often, trapping is served from a separate board and not in sofware so I wonder if the trapper board may be going, but then again software has to control the trap which could cause the halo.

Is this with black text over a solid? If so, that would be black overprint not trapping. Try toggling the black overprint option and see if it gets better / worse.


Now that I think about it, it might be memory. You mentioned the 1/2" color bands, that could be and the rest could be symptoms of failing memory.

Hard to pin down, maybe Elmo can lend some insight?

The trapping problems do tend to be more when there are screen panels like pastel colors or that density range.. This is where I get the halo problem the most.

Dale

Does it change with the line screen? Or does it stay the same?

Pretty much the same... I guess you can talk yourself into something..

Dale

If it doesn't change with linescreen then it is clearly a DFE generated issue since line screen is applied in the engine itself.

Out of curiousity, does the issue show up when outputing to a tiff via the DocuSP? Not sure if you can still do that on DocuSPs or not?

If this is 3.0, use the Advanced Preview function and look for it there. If so, it's in the software somewhere (and likely is). You can save that advanced preview as a soft proof and send it off.

Beautiful! I should of thought of checking that way myself. I will try it in the next day and let you know what the outcome is..

Thanks!

Dale

You can't output to a tiff in color DocuSP, not directly. You can set it up for decomp, but the result is a jpeg compressed file--which is different than how the monochrome DocuSP machines work. The old "RIP it to a 600dpi TIFF" thing works great in monochrome, but the jpeg compression in color makes it something not useful.

In DocuSP 6 (er, um, FreeFlow Print Server), you can do the Advanced Preview--which is a true RIP output. You can then save that to a PDF, which really just puts a PDF wrapper around that full-boat bitmap. Most importantly, that bitmap is the result of the RIP process, including all job ticket settings. It's a true output of the entire workflow.

So in essence, saving the advanced preview out as a PDF is how you get a full TIFF output from the FreeFlow Print Server.