You are here:

Adobe Illustrator/Printing Issues/ Transparency

Advertisement

Expert: - 2/25/2010


Question

Messed Up Print
Hello,
I have created a poster in illustrator and it has one placed image with a transparent background in it(it is a PNG file). The background of the document is supposed to be a rich black and there is also another gray rectangle intentionally layered behind the object. However, every time the poster prints, the PNG object appears to have a black box around it and the main background prints out as a messy medium gray color. Basically, everything that is supposed to be a dark color gets distorted. The box that appears to be around the PNG also has one thin red line and one blue line on either sides of it. I have tried different file types other than PNG and they all print like this. This project is due tonight, so I'm running out of time. I have attached what the printed poster looks like.

Answer
Hi Laurel,

The fact that you are getting cyan and magenta lines around it leads me to only one thing - your printer is out of calibration so the print heads are not printing your rich black accurately and it cannot print the darker, more saturated colors accurately. This would cause your grays to appear muddy and the out of registration lines to show up as magenta and cyan. Calibrate your printer and then try printing swatches of the background gray color and a rich black swatch only with no png file and see how they look.

For the transparency issue save your files as PSD with no background layer. This should solve that problem.

Thanks

Kevin  

Kevin Stohlmeyer

Expertise

I am an Adobe Certified Instructor. I can answer all your questions about Adobe Illustrator version 8 through the new Adobe CS5 versions.

Experience

I am an Adobe Certified Instructor for Adobe Illustrator and have been teaching this application to college students for the past 6 years. I now teach this as a corporate instructor.

Organizations
Milwaukee Adobe Users Group National Association of Photoshop Professionals C2 Graphics Productivity Solutions

Education/Credentials
BA - Graphic Design Adobe Certified Instructor - Illustrator Adobe Community Professional

©2012 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.