The blacks on my art are different - anyone have a spinal tap logo vector?

[eds1275]

OK so I have my marquee art 99% complete. I used a jpg found on the internet of the Spinal Tap logo and it looks good - great even. Until I print it. Then the blacks get blacker around the logo where the jpg was. On-screen you can't tell there is a difference. It was done up in adobe illustrator cs5 by a friend.

Does anyone have an idea on what I could do to fix it? Better yet, is there anyone who has a copy or could zip me up a vector image of the tap logo?



That's the test print on my out-of ink inkjet [out of ink on the laser printer, but it did do the black blacker around the logo].

Any ideas on what the problem is?

[SavannahLion]

The first place I would check would be whether the two areas are indeed the same. Black should be 000000 on the color code. On the monitor, you could have 010101 and it would still appear black but the printer might see it differently. This was an old trick on a lot of games where a color such as blue minus 1 is defined as being transparent. You can't tell the difference but the computer sure as hell can.

The other is whether the printer is properly calibrated(?). This is something I don't really know how to fix. There is a printer at work that I use, sometimes, for printing out true black images but for some damn reason if I don't have the mean(?) average the same across the sheet, then the printer doesn't keep the whites truly white but grays them out a bit. I'm not entirely sure what happens there.

I've seen similar effects on ink based printers but the effect is inverted. It's the color that's getting lost. I'm not entirely sure what causes that either. Replacing the ink heads sometimes helps, sometimes not. Some printers do have a setting that forces the printer to pause between each "line" to allow the ink to settle/dry/whatever that seems to help on intense colors. I've only seen a few printers come with that option though. I think photo is supposed to have that option built in but.... well

TBH, I don't do a lot of printing outside of tests or documents.

[eds1275]

yeah I'm just doing test prints until it's right, then im sending it to someone else to print it properly. I will play around with it some more and report back what I find.

[rikitiki]

yeah basically what what posted above
but one thing that would help would be to remove the black around the SP logo
and then layer it with a vector fill for the main black bg
a vector fill will provide the best black over a raster when printing even at 000rgb or 100 cymk
 

[eds1275]

In other exciting artwork related news, once I figure this out a company I have worked with in the past is going to print it for me for free!

[BobbyG66]

Use Photoshop to get rid of the black background.
Then bring the JPEG back into Illustrator.