Max hi
On 5 Nov 2008, at 11:14, Max Roberts wrote:
I’ve known that in times past, Postscript hasn’t easily been able to
deal with gradients and transparency. I’ve been experimenting with
some effects, and what I find is that if I use my preferred route
(export as EPS and then compile as PDF by Acrobat) then the sections
with transparent objects get rasterised, not what I want at all.
If I export from Intaglio as PDF, the vectors and their effects are
preserved, but this route mangles all the colours, so my carefully
set up CMYK shades go out the window (plus my PC owning colleagues
sometimes have trouple with PDF files created like this).
I’m not sure if I fully understand the problem but I played around
some and possibly the alpha channel experience using Graphic Converter
might be of interest.
I created a drawing made from three intersecting paths in bue, red and
brown of varying transparency.
I chose the CMYK default colour space.
I saved as PDF.
When I read the file anew and converted to editable pdf all looked
fine except that the colour space reverted to RGB.
I went back to the original intaglio file.
Drew another path and applied the gradient.
I could not change it’s opacity: though the numbers represented by the
slider changed the slider did not move and the opacity of the stroke
remained the same.
I copied the gradient stroke and went into GraphicConverter.
http://www.lemkesoft.com/
I pasted into the Alpha Channel.
This now gave me a stroke of varying transparency though the colour is
all white (I have not looked to do more with this).
I cropped the image to leave me with the alpha channel part (where i
did the paste).
Selected all and copied and went back into intaglio and pasted.
The different degrees of transparency remained.
I saved as PDF.
Opened the pdf file in intaglio.
The gradient on the original gradient stroke is reversed!
However, the gradient of the “alpha channeled stroke” is as before.
The whole thing decomposes nicely when converted to editable pdf.
Intaglio 3.0.1 on 10.5.5 (must set default intaglio app to the
recently updated intaglio)
Here are the files
http://juliuspaintings.co.uk/intaglio/theOriginal.intaglio
http://juliuspaintings.co.uk/intaglio/theConverted.pdf
Any suggestions for more eps friendly ways of achieving the
following effects? Preferably ones that will not take me an hour to
do!
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/underground/GeoDiag_Pinch.tiff
Notes: the text effects (look at Piccadilly Circus) have been
created by cloning the text to a new layer underneath the text
layer, and giving a 6pt stroke to the letters, set to 0C0M0Y0K
(white) and 75% transparency. The river effect has been created by
cloning the relevant stretch of river to a new layer above the
Underground lines, and setting it to 60% transparent.
The river effects I can do by converting strokes to outlines and
then combining river and line to give me an object the shape of
where the line crosses the river and setting this to a new colout.
This will take me an hour to do!
No comprendo. Are you speaking of the, for instance, thin
parallelogram shape of the gray tube line where crossed by river above
the word westiminster?
Hope preceding re alpha is useful?
Can I ask why you are working in CMYK?
I have the impression cmyk is a printing colour space but these days
we can work in almost anything.
To get the colours right I think one needs to start by calibrating
one’s screen properly.
There are then printer calibration programs one can employ to ensure
one is getting reasonable translation of the stored data into physical
ink, e.g. google “printer calibration”. But starting with a properly
calibrated screen is I think the most important since after that one
can fiddle with the printer settings until one gets roughly what one
wants. This is assuming one’s printer software permits it!! Important
to remember in all these processes is that each transformation looses
information and that different media give different results so an
image on the screen will never translate precisely into print. (Where
I once worked one of my colleagues was a world authority on colour. It
is a billion, trillion dollar business, and the process of getting
from drawing board to printed object is just one of continual image
degradation. And the business of colour perception is just incredible)
I had for the past few years been looking for a printing shop able to
reproduce my Bella’s Dream.
http://juliuspaintings.co.uk/cgi-bin/paint_css/bella/bellasDream.pl
My problem was that every one I gave it to would produce a print as
dead and lifeless as could be. They were simply unable to provide the
vivid colours.
One of the reasons was that they insisted on converting everything to
CMK and that had the immediate effect, visible on screen of deadening
the colours particularily the red.
I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of those using
modern printing technology have very little idea of how to use it
properly. As well as that their main business is printing cheap
brochures and posters and no one outside the art world seems that
bothered about quality anymore so it’s a don’t care culture and
printing skills are going for a burton.
A friend of mine finally found a promising print shop in london that
allowed one to fiddle with the colours oneself.
We went there to print stuff because I was sure that with a bit of
work I could get a satisfactory result.
But these people were real pros and I had very little to do. They got
interested in the problem!!!
The people in london did not insist on converting to cmyk and gave
great support to finding the right colour balance - there’s nothing
like working with someone who really knows their stuff!
We adjusted everything appropriately in photoshop and printed in rgb
and although different media (digital c-print and I think it was the
epson 9800 on really nice paper) gave different results the vivacity
of colour survived. No, not just survived: Was Fantastic!
Though I have no immediate way of comparing, the map you’re producing
looks like a perfect facsimile of the original and looks beautiful.
all the best
Julius
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