Eye-One / iMac

The Eye-One colorimeter and the iMac arrived today. The Eye-One will allow me to profile the printer to achieve more accurate color. The iMac will allow me to use the image expert software to quantify the print quality.

WoodGrain 3

While researching our printing options, I came across information stating that the bitmap conversion in Photoshop has the screen option I need to get the proper frequency and angle to print the woodgrain pattern. I ended up selecting each channels separately and changing to bitmap mode using the necessary settings. I then save the resulting image as a tiff, imported into illustrator, added the cornermarks, crosshairs, and art tags. This turned out to be a great way to accomplish this, because now the frequency and angle of the dots are rasterized into each image, rather than being subject to the RIPs interpretation.

WoodGrain 2

The decision was made to pursue the woodgrain pattern via traditional screenprinting techniques. I was able to take the CMYK image, convert it to a multichannel document using existing colors for the separations. I am working in Adobe CS3, so when I called our production art department, we ran into an issue. While I could send images to the RIP/imagesetter using the screen options in Photoshop, they could not. It seems Adobe removed these options from the print dialog in CS5. Tomorrow I will work with the art department in Sidney to get these printed.

Marketing board

I have been asked to print boards for displaying some of our finishes. I have never printed on foam core boards before. Aside from adjusting the head height, I didn't expect any differences, I was wrong. The board was slightly wider than the metal blanks I usually print on, so the vacuum did not hold it to the belt on one end. This caused some head strikes. I added the additional vacuum chamber, but this time the paper that sandwiches the foam started to curl at a corner causing some head strikes. After cleaning the heads a couple times, I finally got the boards completed for the marketing group.

Marketing Meeting

I was asked to participate in a brainstorming session with the marketing group. An intern had researched existing displays of kitchen backsplashes at local hardware and home improvement stores. We then discussed the best ways to display and market our product. I had never been involved in such a session, and found it extremely enjoyable.

Ghost image / shadow

Over the weekend, the printer seems to have developed a severe problem with satellites / overspray. I spent the entire day cleaning and purging the heads, re-running the alignment test and readjusting the head heights. This seems to have reduced, if not eliminated the issue.

New RIP

I was just informed that I will be working with an outside contractor who is developing a RIP for our application. This will be very beneficial. I will have input on how the files will be handled, and the RIP will be tailored to our needs.

Test Results

All of the testing has been completed with the off the shelf inks. Though it did surprise us with a few of it's results, there is no way it will be acceptable to any of our customers. The next step is to either develop inks internally, develop a topcoat internally, apply an existing film, or any combination of the three. Thankfully it is not my call. For now, I will just continue testing and tweaking the printer.

Photo

In a break from design and digital printing, our marketing department asked that I take a stock image of a kitchen, and make variations of it as if the cabinets were made of different woods. Luckily the original image had white cabinets. This allowed me to add an overlay layer for each wood pattern (with a layer opacity of 79%). I then duplicated the original image and masked off everything but the cabinet handles and placed this in front of the wood layers. I added additional layers to enhance the shadows and highlights. I am pretty happy with the final results, and the marketing department was pleased.

Wood Grain

We are once again pursuing a viable woodgrain look. At one point we had screen printed a burl walnut pattern for the interior trim pieces of simi trucks. Our process resulted in about a 20% success rate. 80% scrap meant that this was not a profitable business. The new goal is to produce the parts using digital printing. I have created the pattern and printed a sample. Every thing looks good. There is so much movement in the pattern, that stitching it together seamlessly was not difficult, just a little time consuming. Now if we can come up with a topcoat that passes customer specification, we might be able to sell the product.

Low res images

I started testing low resolution images on this machine. As I expected, the 72 dpi images looked pretty bad. I then opened a 300 dpi image. The original image was 4x5, so I decided to try printing it at twice it's normal size. I was amazed at how well it printed. There was no pixelation. I then proceeded to print it at for times it's normal size. With an initial resolution of 300 dpi, this would equal 75 dpi at it's new size. To my amazement, it still looked really good. I can only assume that the RIP is using some type of interpolation to smooth out the image. I then enlarged the image even father, to 8 times it's normal size, and I finally started to see some of the pixelation I was expecting.

Design Meeting

I was supposed to have a design meeting to discuss the next step with the prototypes I had worked on, but it has been postponed. I am told I will be spending 8 hours a week on design again soon, though.

Printing White Again

I tried printing a new vector image that required white ink. I opened it in Illustrator and changed the 0% CMYK areas to WHITE_INK and re-saved it. I then proceeded to try printing. Everywhere that was specified as WHITE_INK was still being printed as a dropout. I tried everything within the RIP, but still had no luck. It turns out that all the files I had successfully printed before were saved as PDFs. This one was an EPS. Apparently EPS files discard spot colors. Once I saved it as a PDF, everything worked fine.

April Fools

It's April fools, and there was not a single prank at work today. Initial testing showed the ink from our supplier is failing every customer spec. This was to be expected, but I kept hoping it was someone's idea of an April fools joke.