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Participant
March 5, 2025
Question

Jagged stair-step pattern in designs when tifs exported from Illustrator are printed on film

Hi all! I desperately need help with a problem I'm having. I've been working in production design for various screen printers for a long time and the problem only came up recently but is persisting. My client prefers I export separated tif files of the artwork for her to print on film and then use for screenprinting, and whenever the artwork is vector everything is fine. But when any part of the design is raster, even if the file looks sharp when previewed on screen, it gets a really dramatic stair-stepped or jagged look around every edge (images attached). I read that it might be an anti-aliasing or "art optimizing" problem when exporting but those settings are turned on. Please help if you have any idea what is happening, I need the problem fixed quickly. Thanks!

1 commentaire

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 5, 2025

Looks more like halftone screening to me.

Is this 100K?

Or does that printer have trouble with PostScript?

Participant
March 5, 2025

Yes 100 K. I couldn't tell you if the printer has trouble with PostScript, I can ask.

The weirdest part is the files worked perfectly before when exported and printed to film. Do you know what print setting on her end would be distorting files like this? Or how I could address and correct this if it IS something that accidentally changed in Illustrator?

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 5, 2025

There are printers who are just doing this. I have a crappy brother laser printer that is doing this as well. Not a lot you can do about it.