Photo & Illy not playing nice

[colonel5]

I'm working on creating an ad for our company to go in one of our industries magazines and I'm running into an issue that I've ran into before but in a time crunch had to change my direction. Maybe some of you can help me on this.

I have the ad built in Illy, I have a photo that I brought into photoshop and put a mask on it to erase the background so it would be transparent when I placed it in my Illy file. On the screen it looks fine but when I go to print it there is a light box around my image that is a little darker than the background color. So let's say the background of the ad is orange, when I print it there is a redish/orange rectangle around the file I placed into Illy.

any workarounds or thoughts?

[urstwile]

How do you have your flattener settings set up in Illy? I'm wondering if that might be part of the problem?

[nyc_skater]

Maybe your mask isn't really masking off everything you need it to. I know weird things happens with aliasing and pixels and edges of boxes. Like if you enlarge something by transforming it and it's a rectangle or something, I've noticed the last row of pixels are more transparent.

[Silence04]

maybe try applying the mask in photoshop before you place it in illustrator.

[balou]

I get that same thing on my color laser printer. I can print the same thing on my inkjet and it's fine. Have you checked your separations? Is it OK there? If so, my guess is it's a postcript thing. But I agree with Silence, I'd create a mask in Photoshop first.

[colonel5]

yeah, the idea of it being because of the laser printer is more than likely it. Stupid HP