[Keith Marshall]

Hey no problem. I’m in the same boat 3 years short of 60. The mileage is catching up with me. Took me a moment to figure it out because the icons to reply are fuzzy low res.

[Keith Marshall]

There should be a bar of options just below the response with a yellow “Reply” box. Click that and then add your remarks and post direct. It is what I did here to respond. The other options in the bar are: like, email, Facebook, Reddit and Indeed.

[Keith Marshall]

We realize it could be the monitors and working to get calibrators to compensate. The solution to that is to zoom in quite a bit and if the banding is still showing then its in the file. We do not have any kind of proofing system and printing will assume the file is correct and run almost the entire job before noticing there is a problem. It still is like throwing darts in the dark.

The other thing that likely was causing it was that the RIP color profile was different from the software profile. We have now standardized both to Adobe U.S. Web Coated SWOP v2. This has helped, but there still seem to be situations where despite out best efforts the banding still shows.

As far as gradient color we generally do not mix colors. We will create a gradient with one side 100% fill color and the other the same color set to 0. If another color is needed a second background object is created with 100% of the second color. This has worked decently, but not always.

We generally use the default preview, but I have been working in Overprint Preview because we will get customer files with transparencies that are not supposed to be there, but without OP view turned on you can’t see it and then it prints incorrectly. This has been real problem lately.

As for placed images they generally are right in Photoshop and then embedded so there usually isn’t a problem. Although if making gradients in Photoshop similar banding issues occur and then you have to sort that out as well.

And we ALWAYS work in CMYK, and work in the highest bit depth our system will allow.

What I don’t understand is Adobe used to have a method to assign how many steps you want in a gradient fill which eliminated banding altogether. This is no longer available so you have to stop and figure out which needle in a haystack is causing the problem. It should NOT be this difficult.

[Keith Marshall]

You might try and play with the miter limit for the stroke. It is in the stroke window and is at the far right side of the window. Click in the box and raise the limit which should extend the corners. If it is at 5 raise it to 10 etc. I would also check what cap, corner and align stroke settings you are using and see if those methods give you the corners you want.