# Grayscale/Gradient problems - Black to white fade has colour in it!



## MattR (Dec 20, 2011)

Greetings all,

Sorry I haven't done a proper intro but I'm in a bit of a pickle/hurry so this will have to double as my intro - 'Hi!'

Anyway, we are a sportswear manufacturer in Australia who sublimate sports garments like footy, soocer, netball, basketball, cycle jerseys etc. Most of our stuff is spot colour and we never have an issue with it but every so often we have to print halftone/grayscale/gradient (not sure what you all refer to it as) and we NEVER have any luck with it.

Basically my problem is this. The design I'm printing has a black to white fade from top to bottom with a few spot colours over the top. The fade/gradient is not a nice black to white but rather a mixture of green bands in the gray area towards the bottom of the fade. Of course once we heat press/transfer it onto our material it looks even worse. 

I've read many times before on the net about this happening in dye sub etc but I've never had a good fix for it. Surely I'm missing something. I'll list our equipment below incase anyone has any tips on how to get the gradients right (our equipment may seem pretty archaic to some of you but it serves us well - except for this gradient/grayscale issue)

Roland HiFi Jet Pro II FJ 540
4 colour/dye sub inks
matte transfer paper
CorelDraw 10/X3 for design
PhotoPRINT SERVER for rips

There are many settings in Corel's export menus aswell as PhotoPRINTS rip menus so can anyone give a little guidance as to what settings need to be set to what to possibly fix this gradient/grayscale problem?

Thanks very much in advance
Matt


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## uncletee (Feb 25, 2007)

try printing in black only mode, ??? it will take out the color, good luck, uncletee


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## PositiveDave (Dec 1, 2008)

I suspect that it's green because your icc profile isn't very accurate.
The banding is possibly Postscript banding caused by using a halftoning method with low output resolution.


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## BRC (Mar 27, 2007)

Corel doesn't always do gradients very good. I'm betting that you are doing a large graphic too. You might be better off doing a background gradient in Photoshop the size of your final graphic and saving it. Then import it into Corel and Powerclip it into your graphic.


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## cprvh (Jan 23, 2006)

If your profile was producing good neutral gray scales from the start, you should just need to reliniarize and be good to go.


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## Imageit (Dec 22, 2011)

The type of dye sub ink you are using could be the cause. You didn't state what type of ink your using but if it is Sawgrass Artanium you wont ever fully get the green tint out. The best black I have saw to date in the new SublM ink.
Either way here are some tips to try:
Use RGB - 0,0,0 for your black make up in the file CMYK builds will not work for a true black with most sub inks.
Check your profile as it might not be rendering the files with the proper color make up.


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## SaB (May 15, 2007)

Imageit said:


> You didn't state what type of ink your using but if it is Sawgrass Artanium you wont ever fully get the green tint out.


Do you want to bet?? 
I am creating custom icc for sublimstion ink every day and I have done loads for artanium . And it was exactly this same problem. yellow cast, green or red cast. Also custom created ICC will help with gradients as color gamut is MUCH better.


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## Imageit (Dec 22, 2011)

WOW...cool your jets brother...last i checked this isn't a pissin match but a forum for all to voice there experience to help others out and gain knowledge of your own!
I am glad to hear you could obtain a good black building your own profiles but the bottom line is Sawgrass replaced the artanium series of inks with SubliM for a variety of reasons to include the black not being a true black output without reinventing the wheel and the particle size of the ink set still was clogging heads.
Also keep in mind not everyone using sublimation inks has the ability, knowledge, funds or understanding of color profiling to tweak the profiles to obtain a better output nor should they have to as the distributor should have built better profiles for the ink set.


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## SaB (May 15, 2007)

sorry if I upset you  only trying to say that sawgrass dont put much effort to profiles. and if you get your own done then you can get bloody descent results.


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## Imageit (Dec 22, 2011)

Its all good you didn't upset me...you have the right to voice your opinion brother.....


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