Weird Issue

[appstro]

This may or may not have anything to do with RAMpage so I will just tell you what happened and get your opinions. Yesterday I received a hack pdf from a client. I was going to just RIP it in Rampage and go with it but I noticed that it had no bleed. I decided to open it up in Photshop and scale the background image a bit. When I opened it it had several layers. So me thinks that it must have been made in Photoshop to begin with. Anyway, other than missing fonts the whole thing was in RGB. So after I got the file looking like I wanted I converted it to CMYK and saved it as a TIFF and popped it into indesign. Then I exported it as a PDF again and registered it in RAMpage. It looked acceptable enough, so I proceeded to impose it in preps and printed that file back to RAMpage. Then I registered the imposition as usual. Now all I had to do was proof the thing and here is where everything went goofy. I sent the file to the epson printer. When it started printing there was no black!!! I figured the print head was dirty. After all its a brand new epson, it must be filthy....LOL.!! So I ran a cleaning cycle and printed again....still no black. Meanwhile other proofs from other workstations are coming in fine and printing just fine. I ran a low res on our old 43wide and it looked fine. All the values on screen look fine and there is definitely black in it. Its CMYK. The res is 300. I cant understand if its loosing the black channel on the way to the epson or if RAMpage is not happy with the file. I decided to try and run a Kodak Approval before I walked out for the night. I will have to wait till tomorrow to see how that turned out. Anyone else have a similar experience????

 

[almaink]

What does the monitor proof show? I never would use Photoshop on any PDF just bad form IMO. For missing bleed I either use Pit Stop or enlarge the PDF in InDesign first and re-export as a PDF.

 

[baxfly]

The only time I've ever had a 4 color image with no black is when the wrong profile was used for the RGB to CMYK conversion.

 

[appstro]

The approval looked fine and we printed it. I just dont know what caused the problem in rampage. It appears to be profile related like you said. The monitor proof looked great...

 

[macphenom]

Did it go to the epson using RPD or something like Oris or GMG?
I have seen that issue pop up with Oris.

 

[appstro]

It was ORIS. Hmmmm. What causes it?

 

[buckeye]

Why bring it into InDesign to export to a pdf? I send photoshop pdf's to Rampage all the time. Layered pdf's from photoshop will remain vector but saving it as a tiff will rasterize the type.

Erik

 

[appstro]

I guess I could have done that. I completely forgot that
Photoshop can do that now.

 

[macphenom]

What version of Oris are you running?
I am not sure as to what the exact cause is, I am still looking into it. For what ever reason it seems to drop a sep prior to recombining them for output to the epson. I had a sales/tech from Oris in the plant today and it totally slipped my mind to ask him about the issue. I haven't had it crop up for quite awhile now so thats why I forgot to ask.
Are you using a tif to a hot folder or are you using the Fuji Tif option that is made for Oris?

 

[appstro]

We delayed the "file handling" from 60 seconds to 90 seconds today and that seems to have solved it!!! I believe we are using a TIF hot folder. I will keep you posted Thanks!

 

[SaltH2Odeprived]

We delayed the "file handling" from 60 seconds to 90 seconds today and that seems to have solved it!!! I believe we are using a TIF hot folder. I will keep you posted Thanks!

I had the same issue with ORIS and after much trial and error, that is the same fix I came up with. It appears that on more complex jobs, the rip would start processing the seperated files before they were all completed sending from RamPage to the ORIS rip. Black being the last plate, it drops out. I increased the ORIS hot folders delay before processing time and problem went away.

A different issue I have yet to resolve with ORIS is if I send a 1 color PMS using the RamPage Fuji Tif output, it comes out black... anyone find a fix for that problem?

 

[macphenom]

At this point the pms coming out a black has not been fixed by CGS. I talked to tech support about this issue and they were going to contact CGS Germany but thats as much as I have heard. If you have 2 channels in the ripped page even if one is empty it comes out correctly. Its only when you have one channel that is a pms that it goes to black.