Several years ago we purchased a Xerox 700 and have been impressed with the machine. When we were in talks with Xerox they showed us a sample brochure which had been printed on a showroom model. It was incredible! (brochure of flies used in fly fishing) The detail, colour, sharpness is something I haven't even seen on a litho press. Suspicious, we asked for a copy of the file and Xerox kindly sent us the PDF file. We simply imposed the file and hit print. BINGO! Exceptional quality that would impress even the harshest critic.
My Question - whats the secret! My guys are pretty clued into all the technical setup but are still unable to create artwork that produces quality like the Xerox supplied artwork. Even our Xerox rep couldn't help.
Is there anyone out there who knows settings or tips for reproducing sup sharp, detailed photos? Obviously Xerox are going to supply artwork that reproduces well but we print some excellent work from professional photographers and still get average results.
In my former life I supervised digital production running iGens, when we installed it Xerox provided a file on "How to Design for Digital"; you should inquire with your rep and see if they are familiar with this booklet. In the mean time, I'll look and see if I can find a copy of it.
I have a Xerox 700 and I know EXACTLY what you are talking about. The missing piece of the puzzle here is output sharpening.
I have a Photoshop action that does this (optimised for the Xerox 700, but it should work for most CMYK halftone devices).
If you want to dig deeper then "Real World Image Sharpening", a book by Bruce Fraser (God rest his soul) will give you plenty of information.
The action needs to be run on the RGB file before conversion to CMYK. Do a side-by-side comparison of a normal image and one with output sharpening and I think you will be amazed.
Last edited by Pokey; 10-19-2011 at 12:46 PM.
Reason: correction
Just to save you some time, here is a PDF with a side-by-side comparison of two images, one optimally sharpened for Xerox 700 screening and one not. The bottom image looks perfectly sharp on the screen at 100% zoom but it does not print as sharply as the top image.
Good sharpening, just like good colour correction, is just as relevant for digital as it has always been for offset.
Colour correction and sharpening have traditionally been the domain of the pre-press guys so it's not surprising that a lot of designers don't know so much about it and I suspect in this digital age we have plenty of designers sending directly to the digital printers without performing these necessary tasks.
Thanks, Pokey, for the actions. However, while there may be some tweaking that is beneficial for particular machines I don't believe that a general, all purpose action will be good for all images as images need individual attention. For images up to ~15MB I've found that an unsharp masking setting of Amount=120%, Radius=2 and Threshold=0 works well if you then fade the USM to suit the image, if you fade it with "luminosity" you avoid any colour fringing that can occur at the contrast edges (last bit courtesy of Dan Margulis).
"However, while there may be some tweaking that is beneficial for particular machines I don't believe that a general, all purpose action will be good for all images as images need individual attention."
Yes you are quite right, each image will need to be sharpened specific to its content. However, I would like to draw a distinction between sharpening for image content and output sharpening which is designed to compensate for the screening process which is exactly the same for every image going to same press.
Output sharpening is indeed a one-size-fits-all procedure (as it addresses the softness introduced by halftone screening) and should be applied in addition to image sharpening as a last step before going to press.
As a matter of fact, the Canon imagePRESS line does output sharpening in RIP, which is a nice timesaver. When I started using the Xerox machines I noticed that the images did not appear as crisp as the Canon's without a manual application of output sharpening to each image.
As far as I can see, this appears to simply be over sharpening an image to compensate for the softness introduced by halftone screening - and would apply to any type of printing including offset, not just the Xerox.
The old rule of thumb is that if the image appears slightly too sharp - harsh on the screen then it is right for the press.
BTW, for me, the simplest way of doing artifact-free image sharpening is to use the high pass filter in PShop.
I was able to duplicate your sharpened squirrel by simply
1) opening the image
2) duplicate the image to a second layer (command J)
3) desaturate that layer so that it appears as greyscale.
4) apply the high pass filter with a radius of 0.9
5) set that layer's blend mode to "hard light"
If that's too strong lower the opacity of that second layer until you get what you want.
If that's not strong enough then duplicate that second (now third) layer's opacity until you get what you want.
6) flatten image.
One of the advantages (besides simplicity) of using the high pass filter is that the sharpening layer can be modified using the opacity slider and that you can erase portions of the image where you do not want any sharpening (e.g. areas of flat color like skies).
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