Illustrator CS4 improved gradients or death trap???

[Tech]

So when I read this from help menu...

"Transparency in gradients
Create gradients with two or more colors and define the opacity of any or all individual colors. By specifying different opacity values for the different color stops in your gradient, you can create gradients that fade in or out and reveal or hide underlying images."

...I began to wonder what if:
A designer decides to create a linear gradient with 3 stops, each stop with different opacity (in an effort to reveal underlying art/image), using two different spot color to create this marvelous gradient... Why stop here? Let's apply this gradient on a few objects within a complex illustration and then slap in a few blend modes and drop shadows...

So the real question is, will this be a masterpiece artwork or file from hell trying to get it print correctly or nothing crazy will happen or Adobe forgot to test this stuff prior to "improving" gradients in Illustrator?

[gordo]

So when I read this from help menu...
"Transparency in gradients
Create gradients with two or more colors and define the opacity of any or all individual colors. By specifying different opacity values for the different color stops in your gradient, you can create gradients that fade in or out and reveal or hide underlying images."
...I began to wonder what if:
A designer decides to create a linear gradient with 3 stops, each stop with different opacity (in an effort to reveal underlying art/image), using two different spot color to create this marvelous gradient... Why stop here? Let's apply this gradient on a few objects within a complex illustration and then slap in a few blend modes and drop shadows...

And I began to wonder how the designer can figure that out but can't understand the basics of RGB to CMYK transforms. LOL

gordon p
my print blog here: Quality In Print

[T]

So when I read this from help menu...

"Transparency in gradients
Create gradients with two or more colors and define the opacity of any or all individual colors. By specifying different opacity values for the different color stops in your gradient, you can create gradients that fade in or out and reveal or hide underlying images."

...I began to wonder what if:
A designer decides to create a linear gradient with 3 stops, each stop with different opacity (in an effort to reveal underlying art/image), using two different spot color to create this marvelous gradient... Why stop here? Let's apply this gradient on a few objects within a complex illustration and then slap in a few blend modes and drop shadows...

So the real question is, will this be a masterpiece artwork or file from hell trying to get it print correctly or nothing crazy will happen or Adobe forgot to test this stuff prior to "improving" gradients in Illustrator?

So what's different than usual?

[toronar]

So what's different than usual?

I was asking myself the same question

Tales from the ... "creative designer" on how to solve problems:
How would you create a page for a tool catalog that has to have a blue background?
Draw a rectangle and fill it with a blue color? Nah, that would be to easy and not really creative-ly.

Instead, draw a lot of lines with varying thickness, bordering any placed pictures and textboxes by eyesight on 50% zoomlevel. About 200 lines per page should be enough. Don't forget that aligning perfectly to the pictures/texts is optional and indeed even among the lines themselves. On my screen and 50% zoom I don't see any white lines!
To add insult to injury, do that on 32 pages ... BUT don't you dare use copy and paste!
Every single page had a different pattern of lines to "create" a blue background.

The "creative" designer bitched a lot about the white lines everywhere on the proof being our fault. We clearly don't know what we were doing, and he demanded not to speak to anyone but the owner of the business himself.
After a lot of back and forth between the client ("why can't you print such a simple thing correct?"), designer and our boss the designer graced us merely mortal prepress-folk with his presence and brought his Quark XPress files with him. After deleting all lines on a page ("what are you doing? that was a lot of work!") and replacing them with a simple rectangle ... he and his client just stood there, jaws open. I never got another piece of work from that designer, but his client is with us till this day.

I would have gladly helped the designer understand what he was doing wrong, but as you say: you reap what you sow.

[Lukas Engqvist]

: ) nice to read that we're not the only ones thath get "interesting" designs. But really InRipTrapping is the only way. If you need to trap complicated Illy stuff you can allways export to tiff and do the TIFF trapping in Photoshop

[Luc St-Pierre]

These transprencies in spot color gradients are already a nightmare to me. My rip, in its actual version, will not chew those correctly and will even drop in some replacememt in CMYK here and there.

[Grnofslt]

On this one I can't speak from experience, since the simple artwork we create doesn't use transparency except for in the case of a drop shadow here and there but from my reading I thought that when transparency was involved in a file that one had to flatten the image, that is, rasterize the effects before sending the file to the rip in order to prevent problems with out put.

I live in the stone age where I do prepress, in that we don't have an image setter or rip either, we use an old camera and shoot line shots in a dark room. So if I'm simplistic in my statements above, please forgive me.

Bill

[mschilling]

So when I read this from help menu...

"Transparency in gradients
Create gradients with two or more colors and define the opacity of any or all individual colors. By specifying different opacity values for the different color stops in your gradient, you can create gradients that fade in or out and reveal or hide underlying images."

It looks to me like Adobe is trying to make the "opacity mask" feature from CS3 more accessible. When encountering these blends, where one end is transparent, and the other end is opaque, it took me quite a while to figure out how they did it. There was a little dashed underline in the appearance menu that denotes the opacity mask was used. If they make that easier to use, I would appreciate it. It is a nice feature and makes some very beautiful effects editable in Illustrator.