Printing Issue with Live Trace

[RICKSELF]

We just finished up printing a 4/4 brochure that went through composite proofs and a press check without catching this problem. The client created vector art using the Live Trace feature in CS2.
Here's the before print image:


And here's the after print image:


Wouldn't (shouldn't) Illy have a threshold setting so that the darker background wouldn't come thru the lighter foreground image?

We will be reprinting the job and I found in the RIP that if I turn off overprint and re-rip, it looks fine. But I don't feel safe turning off overprint for the entire job. And I could go through and manually set what needs to trap and overprint manually.

Just seems Illy should have handled it.
Thanks!

[David]

Is it a common practice to do such a detailed trace like that?
You may be asking it to do a little too much.
Was the trace "expanded" after the tracing was done?
There are a few settings you can alter to see if it gives you the results you need, I've played with them on occasion and tweaked a few and got it to work better, but I haven't done one that has the complexity of what you show here. I have also had to go into photoshop and made some moves to the original raster image in order to get it to trace better, like up the contrast, sharpen it up a bit and so on.

just curious, why did you trace the image when you could have used the photoshop file?

[RICKSELF]

The file came from a design agency.
I'm the prepress guy.
I guess it's a "look" they were going for, to not use the actual photo.

Funny, after the fact, we went back and looked at the proof supplied by the agency and it had the same thing! Not so funny that we didn't catch it before plating.

[David]

Originally Posted by RICKSELF

I guess it's a "look" they were going for, to not use the actual photo..

I think they could have done the same "look" in PS with a little posterization, but what do I know, I'm just the prepress guy, too!



and, you know that you're not supposed to look at proofs before plating, it's in the rule book!

8O


Believe it or not, I had a sales person actually tell me that they wanted, on all their proofs, all the colors made on overlays so they could tell where all the individual colors were. Cause, you never really know where there is magenta or cyan!

what a ma-roon!

:!:

[spoocobra]

Was that shirt set to overprint in Illustrator? What rip are you using?

[RICKSELF]

It wasn't really as much as "how can I fix it". I have found that if I turn overprint black OFF in the rip, all is good.

The shirts in Illy are made up os so many layers, i can't really find any overprints.

This was just more of a "have you ever seen this" type of thing towards the forum and maybe be aware of it with Illy CS2.

This is going through Preps also and maybe if I imposed the file in Indy instead, it may have been fine... some more work on my part to find out. I'll post my findings by the end of the week.

Thanks all for the input.

[RICKSELF]

Lo & behold... found out the artist traced these all BY HAND!! On his Wacom. So I can't blame Illy's Live Trace after all.

It was human error!

Darn humans, anyway.

[David]

Originally Posted by RICKSELF

... found out the artist traced these all BY HAND!!

they must have been paid by the hour...

if they weren't, they were screwed!


I'd have done it with live trace myself, even tho I have a Wacom tablet as well.


oh well


:lol: