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RG PatientNews
RG PatientNews
Known Participant
February 9, 2016
Question

My gradients are banding on press and yet the pdfs looks smooth. Help!

  • February 9, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 7192 views

My company has upgraded recently from CS3 to Creative Cloud and are now experiencing problems with gradients banding at the platemaking stage.

We've troubleshooted the platemaker with calls to the service department for our platemaker and are confident that the problem is in how we are exporting the pdf files and not with the platemaker itself.  Help.  The pdf presets did not change when we upgraded to CC so why am I suddently having issues with the gradients?  Not only am I experiencing banding problems, but also, the colours separations seems to graduated at different lengths.  ie: A blue made up of magenta and cyan.  The gradient of the cyan will stop sooner than the gradient of the magenta, giving the bottom of my 'blue' gradient a magenta tinge.  Argh.

I've tried adjusting my preset settings.

My original export settings include: Compatibility of Acrobat 4 (1.3), compression image quality: High for colour and bw images, using the CCITT group 4 setting for Monochrome images and the transparency flattener set to High resolution.

The new settings changed these to: Compatibility of Acrobat 8/9 (1.7), compression image quality: Maximum for colour and bw images, using the CCITT group 4 setting for Monochrome images and the transparency flattener is grayed out.

When we ripped files using these presets, it made the files considerably bigger and seemed to help some situations, but not all.  Still a problem....and unfortunately, is not consistant with all gradients.  For instance, a beige gradient on one newsletter worked beautifully while a different beige on another newsletter gave me banding and the weird gradient length inconsistancies.

And it seems that the gradients are stopping between the 10 % to 0 % areas...thus giving me the hard edge.

Has ANYONE else run into this problem and come up with a solution?

Have been told to created gradients in Photoshop and then import into InDesign but we create dozens of newsletter daily and don't have time for that.  All gradients are created directly in ID.  Why offer this feature if it doesn't work?  And it was never a problem when we were using CS3!

If ANYONE can shed some light on this problem, it would be GREATLY appreciated as it is affecting our production time, waste in materials (plates, paper, ink on the presses) AND our high quality standards that our client base has come to expect.

Thanks everyone.

R

2 replies

RG PatientNews
RG PatientNewsAuthor
Known Participant
June 28, 2016

Hi there...

Just wanted to close this question and let everyone know that is WAS a problem with our platemaker after all.  Sigh....it was a long and brutal process to work out the bugs but it turns out that the platemaker was using the wrong profile.

Thanks for all your input though.  We certainly keep it at the back of our brains when designing.

Cheers

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
February 12, 2016

I'll try to help although this may require you to provide some actual samples of InDesign documents as well as the “before and after” PDF files as exported from older and new InDesign versions.

First of all, assuming that you are creating true gradients in InDesign, the PDF that is exported uses the PDF 1.3 (and PostScript 3) smooth-shading operators as opposed to actually creating a raster image in the PDF file. With smooth-shading, only the parameters of the gradient (colors, boundaries, etc.) are specified. It is up to the “renderer” (i.e., what displays the PDF content on the screen or RIPs it to a printer or platemaker) to properly interpret the smooth-shading data and optimize it for the particular display or print device.

Secondly, as far as I know, nothing has been changed in years in terms of how InDesign exports PDF for smooth-shaded gradients. Thus, smooth-shaded gradients from the CS3 version of InDesign (i.e., InDesign 5) should be comparable to those generated by the most recent CC 2015 version of InDesign (i.e., InDesign 11.2).

With your current RIP, can you still produce “better” gradients from the PDF generated from the older InDesign version than from a PDF generated by today's InDesign for the identical InDesign source document? Or are we talking about different source documents?

In terms of the gradients, are any involved with transparency or are they totally opaque? Any involvement with spot colors?

Ultimately, we will need for you to post some samples if we are to have any chance of assisting you.

            - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
RG PatientNews
RG PatientNewsAuthor
Known Participant
February 12, 2016

Hi Dov

Thank you for taking the time to review my problem.  Will do my best to answer your questions.

First I must ask you what a 'True Gradient' is.  We create our gradients by filling a box with a colour, always 100% and then applying the Gradient Feather effect to it so that it's 100% opacity at the top and 0% Opacity at the bottom.

We do not use spot colours...only cmyk.

As for the InDesign versions, we went back in our files and our problems seemed to have started when we upgraded to the InDesign 2014 from the 64-bit program. ??

Unfortunately, the files we are ripping now have been created in CC2015 and cannot be saved down to CS3 to test unless I take the time to redo the layout from scratch.  Ugh.  So no....different source files....hmmm...unless I open an older one that worked previously and rip it out of the new InDesign???  Would have to dig through the files and then find time where the plant isn't too busy to test it.  Bwahahahahahah.  That's a laugh as they are always swamped.  Sigh.........

Ok...so here is a silly question.  This is my first time taking part in a community discussion and have no idea how to upload files.  If you can direct me in the right direction I can upload a sample InDesign file, the final rip pdf and a scan of how it looks on press...  Thank you.

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
February 15, 2016

To answer your really-not-silly question. Except for moderators, these forums do not allow for attachments, only for showing images such as screen shots within your message. If you wish to provide samples, you need to provide a link to some server or file-sharing service / location.

Your information does in fact point to the source of your problem. From your description, it would appear that you are not using smooth-shaded gradients at all (as created by the Gradient Tool) where there is a smooth transition from one hue to another that you define, but rather, you are using feathering (as created by the Gradient Feather Tool) in which transparency is used to cause the color of an object to fade into the background. I most strongly believe that it is this use of transparency combined with your particular workflow that is getting you into trouble.

For certain types of gradient designs, a true gradient and a feathered object can in fact produce comparable results. Use of an actual gradient is strongly preferred, though, unless you are trying to blend the gradient object into other content in the background (other than a solid color). The problem with feathering is that if your workflow includes exported PDF with pre-flattened transparency (as you are doing by using PDF 1.3 compatibility, you are likely to have problems at the RIP. If you have any reasonably recent (i.e. last 10 years) RIP, you should be exporting PDF with live transparency such as you would have with the PDF/X-4 or even the High Quality Print (not the so-called Press Quality) settings.

If you point me to some simple source samples, I'll show you how to convert the feathering to true gradients.

            - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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