Illustrator CS2 Drop Shadow issue

[badboo]

Hi,

I had to design a banner - printed on a 12 feet by 4 feet plastic material. Anyhow I used drop shadow on a font that almost spread all over the width of the banner.

Already in Illustrator I noticed that the drop shadow shows pixels (artifacts - I dunno what to call them). I mean in Photoshop the dropshadow is smooth - but not in Illustrator - at least not in my case.

I thought (me idiot) that it's only a screen issue - but later the printed product looked the same - uaaaahhh.

Nobody noticed lol but I am concerned about this. Does anybody wanna lecture me what I did wrong?

Additionally the high res images i used on the banner - were extremely pixely.

Now that might have been a setting issue of Distiller (which was set to one of the presets - "High quality print")

Oh oh yeah the stuff was printed full color from a distilled PDF at Kinkos.

OK that would be - I appreciate your time!
thx badboo

[PrintDriver]

You've done any number of things wrong when going to that size using Illustrator.

1. Using a KwickiePrint instead of a sign, print, or banner guy.
2. Sending a PDF file rather than native Illustrator with linked images. Especially just using a default print setting (which are for magazine size files) rather than calling and asking. Generally DON'T use pdf's when printing in large format. You get no color correction or pms matching if you use pdf's. Especially at Kwickieprintshops.
3. Using a drop shadow and saving as a pdf without setting your transparency flattening defaults correctly.
4. There is a reason the drop shadow shows up pixellated in the file but I can't remember what it is at the moment. I'm having a stroke at the moment.
Go here:
(http://studio.adobe.com/us/print/main.jsp?xhtml=ptd#colorandtransparency) and read "A Designers Guide to Using Transparency" then read "Transparency...A Print Production Guide" then go up and read about making PDF's... Maybe you can find out why it pixellated on screen.
5. Perhaps insufficient image resolution for taking up to 12'x4'. What was your image source size and scan resolution? Divide the final size by the source size then the source resolution by the number you just got. If it's less than 75dpi your image will begin to look like crap. If it was less than 30dpi you will begin to see pixel boxes. Stock art and digital camera pics won't work.
6. Don't bet that your clients didn't notice.

[badboo]

Thx PrintDriver.

Interesting information.

I totally agree with your post. But let me add some more info to that.
My client considered a 600 x 400 pixel enlarged image to 11" by 17" as awesome quality - just to put his sense of quality in proportion here. That is definetely not making my work better - i know.

Frankly I haven't been printing (designing for printing) those large format for many years. It was my first one... And two issues were basically bothering me about the result which I mentioned above.

The drop shadow - Which is already pixelated on screen and the stock image quality (it's about 3500 x 2000 pixel in size).

Everything else, color and the allover appearance were totally ok. The budget ($70) didn't allow much more fancy work on that in the first place.

I originally wanted to deliver the full size AI file - but Kinkos was unable to use IE to download the file from my web server as their email is limited to i think 5 MB attachments. AI was 75 MB - distilled PDF was like 1.5 MB - so I sent it via mail.

I know - you and maybe other people get chills reading this but it had to be fast and I didn't know who i was dealing with.

Thanks for the link - I will look into that.

badboo

[PrintDriver]

How far from the Kinkos were you? Too far to drive a disk?
The other option is to link your images and send them individually (unless it was all one big image).

As soon as you said $70 for a budget I'd consider the client lucky to get a printed banner at all. A 12x4 shoulda cost you quite a bit more.

Stock images are not usually suitable for large format. You usually need to arrange special scanning, that costs more, and many online cheap stock sources are all digicam crap (crap in the sense not good for large format, the photography is fine). Hate to say it but if the beautiful image you find isn't suited, it isn't suited and you need to seek elsewhere if you are going to keep doing large format and do it right.

As for the pixellating of your drop shadow, what are your raster effects settings and what scale were you working in in your file?

[PrintDriver]

PS - by quick calculation, if you didn't crop your stock image and assuming landscape orientation you were printing at 40dpi or less at final. Much less if you cropped. This is very low for a regular inkjet printing (depending on the machine of course).

Think on this...
YOUR client liked his banner. 15 of his friends show up and look at it. How many of them are gonna like it and how many of those will never use you to design THEIR banner?

[badboo]

PrinterDriver - I value your opinion - however the banner was intended to be placed on the outside of a building 15 feet high.
Besides the poeple who hung it up only i saw the banner close up.

So from about 20 - 30 feet away the banner looked good. I was just not happy about the pixely drop shadow looking at it closely - it was never intended to be a high res print to be looked at 5 inches away.

[badboo]

Haha now take this one:

I am propably not even worth writing this into this forum here - but maybe u might be kind enough to help me out of this.

I did not rasterize any elements of the layout. As far as I know the advantage of vector based programs such as Illustrator is to be able to create vector based output files right?

I am not fimiliar with the hardware and specific printing process of Kinkos banner printing machine so I distilled a 300dpi PDF (where i thought the 300 dpi only affect the stock images anyway).

So the end result was that all vector elements (fonts, shapes, gradients) where crisp and sharp except that funky drop shadow.

So just give me a hint again - concerning the work with transparency and stuff as btw the opacity/transparency was working fine it was only the pixely drop shadow that bugged me.

Don't be too hard on me - I am willing to learn..!

thanks in advance

P.S.: I was only supposed to deliver a PDF - client didn't tell me where he gets banner printed. Document size was the same like the real dimensions but in inches instead of feet.

[PrintDriver]

Drop shadows, inner glow, outer glow, feather and most of the other Stylize effects, the SVG filters and all of the effects at the bottom of the list (actually Photoshop plugins) are raster effects in Illustrator even though it is a vector program. You need to set your raster effects setting to the dpi output required by the print vendor and take into account your 1200% increase in size from file to output.

[badboo]

Hi PrinterDriver,

I hope you can drop a few lines about my issue here.

For a 24" x 26" poster i start off a project in Illustrator with those exact same dimensions right?

The raster settings both for vector and gradient/mesh are at 300 ppi. The images i am using are 8" x 10" at 300 dpi (do I have to blow those up with the fractal plugin for Photoshop to make em look good enough?)

Should this do the trick? I know the info is out there somewhere - but you have been such a great help already that I'd rather ask you then try to download and understand someone else's "how to..." turotial ;)

Oh and btw - is that right to save the print file as an EPS with the linked images instead of a highres PDF?

Please consider that color consistency is really not a very important issue here. Colors being slightly off don't matter at all.

thx in advance Casi

[PrintDriver]

All of these questions should be asked to the printer who is printing your poster.
I would give you completely different answers from someone who prints offset or litho.

Be advised that while Genuine Fractals is good, it is not the be all end all. It does things to images that need to be compensated for and isn't necessarily going to make an image "look good" when enlarged beyond its scan resolution.