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Question

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

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
February 9, 2016
2 replies
7191 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

RG PatientNewsAuthor

Known Participant

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

Legend

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 PatientNewsAuthor

Known Participant

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

Legend

Hi Dov...

I've passed your suggestions onto my design team and we are starting to fix existing gradients and creating new ones using your suggested way. I'm still skeptical however as it still doesn't explain why we never had issues before our Creative Cloud 2015 upgrade. :-(

In any case we will give it a try. Also, one of my designers was asking about the Transparency Flatterner Presets (found under Edit in InDesign). Not every knowing about this feature it is still set to the default setting of 'low resolution'. Could this be part of the issue....should we change it to 'High Resolution" or will it just make our files bigger without actually solving anything? I checked this feature in my CS3 InDesign and it was set at Low res as well so ...... dunno! Sigh.

Will keep testing and keep you posted. We may have to create a gradient test page to send to press to test using various gradients, created in different ways in the colours we've had issues with and see what is what!

R

Flattening only occurs if you export PDF 1.3 or explicit force it. Transparency should always be “live” all the way to the RIP, absolutely not preflattened. Your previous PDF export settings forced transparency flattening; your new ones will not!

Why changes in how the output looks? Changes have been made all along in terms of the flattener code which quite frankly was not designed to provide for smooth gradients.

By the way, in terms of how gradients look, design can make a big difference as well, especially if the gradient has many “stops” in it (i.e., definitions of intermediate colors, shades, etc.). And of course, smooth-shading by definition, does have a dependency on the RIP itself or maybe better stated, on the RIP supplier, to use an algorithm that in fact yields smooth gradations based on the specified printing conditions.

Looking forward to your results.

- Dov

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

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