4 replies to this topic

[Themarko]

I'm looking for a little advice, when I print a nice hillshade (see my post in the Map Gallery) on an HP ColorLaserjet 5500 I get nice pretty colors like I want them to be, but when I expand it to ANSI C or larger and print it on an HPDesignJet 5000 PS I get UGLY colors and lose detail? This is happening when I use IllustratorCS or ArcGIS9.1 and printing a TIFF that I've Photoshopped like crazy.

Or plotter has always had a little bit of green colorshift on rasters, but this is even worse.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Martin Gamache]

but when I expand it to ANSI C or larger and print it on an HPDesignJet 5000 PS I get UGLY colors and lose detail?

Themarko,

Are you letting the plotter driver do the resizing? Are you enlarging the map, or printing it the same size just on a larger size sheet? If so and you dont have enough pixels in your image, resampling will take place which leads to lower print image quality and should be expected.

Two ways around this:

1. In arcmap change your layout size to the desired image size and assuming your shading is of an appropriate resolution for the scale of your map it should look better.

2. If generating a TIFF file to be printed with Illustrator or Photoshop make sure it is being generated at the appropriate resolution and size for your page. You can photoshop like crazy but just because it looks sharp on screen at 72 dpi does not mean it will print out well when enlarged to ANSI C at 144 + dpi.

[Rick Dey]

I'm familiar with the HP800PS and I'm not sure that the options work similarly, but look down into some of the printer options. These are settings within the HP driver on the Mac OS but there may be similar items on the PC driver. Under Image quality there are check boxes for Maximun detail and Optimized for CAD, also a selection for Print Quality-Fast, Normal or Best.

Checking Maximum Detail and Optimized for CAD will typically give good quality without taking forever, and advoiding Fast will make huge improvements in quality.

Settings in your OS may vary.

[Themarko]

Thanks for the advice. I managed to get closer to the colors I wanted by digging way down deep in the printer properties until I found a Color Options button that let me choose Rendering Intents, one was Colormetric which the Help suggested for best colormatching. That helped quite a bit. I think it was taking several shades of green and printing them the same shade. Now it seperates them. Now all I have to do is experiment with the Emulations to find the best settings. What the heck is SWOP Emulation for CMYK for offset presses anway?

It only took 5 years with this plotter to figure all this out

[Matthew Hampton]

Are you printing from an RGB or CMYK colorspace?

"SWOP Emulation for CMYK for offset presses" is a standard for CMYK printing conditions through the Specifications Web Offset Publications (SWOP). This provides each CMYK colorant combination with an unambiguous interpretation of how much ink to use for press operators. It shouldn't make much difference for plotter output.

Colormatching can drive you crazy. When I'm feeling extra color-sensitive I only use CMYK on my Mac and use ColorSync and match profiles between AdobeCS and the plotters.

A lot can depend on where the upsizing takes place. Photoshop utlizes the best upsizing algorithms (bicubic sharper) and shouldn't change coloration at all. Using the PDF file format might make resizing easier. Are you placing your photoshopped tiff in AICS and resizing it there? If you are adding vector data maybe you could try exporting a finalized PDF from AICS, opening it in Acrobat and sending the file to the plotter there. If it's just a native tif, export a PDF out of Photoshop and use Acrobat.

ArcGIS uses RGB as a native colorspace so sending a job to the plotter from there still has to undergo a CMYK separation.

We use Postershop to RIP our jobs before our HP plotters get to it. If your Designjet 5000 does the RIP for you it might be re-interpreting the RGB values. I know that we have seen colorshifts from re-ripping a job in Postershop.
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Matthew