Simple question about gradients

[ivanalbright]

Hi all, I'm new to prepress and commercial printing and am working on a fairly simple design and layout for a magazine.

My layout design has a curved area of solid color at the header and footer of the page and a gradient that fades up to white in the content area of the page. Right now, the top and bottom areas of solid color are filled paths made in Illustrator and the gradient is a 300dpi raster gradient made in Photoshop. I plan to save the whole thing as an .eps in Illustrator, then use Quark to place text and photos over the background .eps.

Is there anything I should be aware of as far as excessive costs associated with a near-full page gradient (on every page), banding issues, or other things that I don't even suspect?

Thank you!

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

don't know how simple te question was. I didn not understand the purpose of doing the gradient in Photoshop. Would it not be simpler to do it in Quark? Banding issues arise from maths. If you use a photoshop gradient, the maths is the converting from pixel values to linescreen.
Editing a photoshop gradient by using curves, levels etc does introduce risk of banding. In vector programs there are smarter alogarithms to ensure maximum smoothness (PostScript Lvl3 and PDF rip).

 

[ivanalbright]

Thanks for the response Lukas. I am extremely new to Quark, I actually didn't know you could make gradients directly in it.

Would it work just as well to make the gradient in illustrator? I just did this and flattened the transparency and it looks okay...I'm much more comfortable with that, and it would be nice to just have a single .eps as the background for pages in Quark.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Gradient

Gradient

You would not even need to flatten transparency. Yes a gradient can be made in illustrator, infact by assigning start and finish values you can do it as one single illustrator object.


moving the house shaped markers inward means the gradient starts a little in.