Poor output image quality with pre-separated spot-to-spot vignettes created by Macromedia FreeHand


Product		Brisque™ 4.0 PS/M 7.0 Macromedia FreeHand^® Adobe^® Acrobat^®Distiller^®
Platform		Brisque 4.0: E30—Victory 43P-140—Tiger1 43P-150—Tiger2 F50—Wildcat (2 and 4 CPUs) 44P-170—Hammerhead 6F1—Condor (2, 4, and 6 CPUs) PS/M 7: Macintosh^®
Operating system		Brisque 4.0: IBM^® AIX 4.3.3 PS/M 7: Macintosh^®

Symptoms		Pre-separated spot-to-spot vignettes created by FreeHand and RIPed by Brisque or PS/M have poor image quality when output to film or plate.

Cause		Brisque or PS/M RIPs vignettes as LW (line work) instead of CT (continuous tone), which causes visible banding on the image. When you output the job to film or plate, the banding results in poor image quality.

Solution		Install the CreoDistillerAssistant in the Adobe Acrobat Distiller Startup folder, typically located at \Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\Distillr\Startup. In Macromedia FreeHand, save the spot-to-spot vignette (blend) as a pre-separated file. Use Adobe Acrobat Distiller to distill the file. In Brisque or PS/M, RIP the file using the following Vignette Handling dialog box settings: Convert Vignette to PS 3 and Smoother Vignettes. The vignette is RIPed as a continuous-tone spot color vignette, not as CMYK separations.

Technical contact(s)		Viki Bar-on
Submitted by		Viki Bar-on
Date submitted		02 September 2002