Epilog Laser burning issue

[tom casey]

I am using a Legend laser with Vista 32 Bit and trying to laser wooden objects. The objects look awesome but there is dots that are appearing all around the objects that should not be there. In illustrator it looks white around object but they still show up. I have drawn a white box behind the letters and the dots still show up. I am a little troubled my this, I never have this problem when I use the univerasal laser that we have. any help would be a life saver.

[Doug Griffith]

One thought is that your color mode is CMYK instead of RGB.

[tom casey]

Doug I just tried it and has no effect. When I send from Illustrator should i use a certain type of RGB. For instanced Adobe RGB 1998 or the default option with the driver?

[Doug Griffith]

RGB type shouldn't make a difference.

A few more thoughts:
1) going from CMYK to RGB maintains the color separation settings of CMYK. For example RGB black may convert to 35,31,31 depending on your settings. It will not be 0,0,0. This may also be affecting your white. It may be 1,1,1 which would generate the dot pattern you describe.
2) I would not use white in a line art illustration. I would use transparent and knock out vector lines instead of masking them.

[Josh Richard]

I have learned that a vector line "hidden" by a raster will still show up in printing. Just because a line is not seen does not mean it is not there in Illustrator.

[Larry Bratton]

Are you by any chance doing a photograph?

[John Noell]

If you post a picture and/or the file it would help greatly in diagnosing the problem.

[tom casey]

thank you for all of the responses. Using any image all of them rasters I get the dots I will look at the setting on the driver for the laser. Thank you all

[tom casey]

sorry this is the best i could do

[Bruce Volden]

Looks like it's "greyscaling" to me. Is this a file made from scratch or one that is taken from internet, scanner, imported etc....One way to tell is to bring it into PP and use the eyedropper in a "supposed" white area, this would tell you if the white is correct and not a varying shade of grey??

Bruce

[David Fairfield]

yeh, there's definitely something in the image which the print driver is interpreting as something other than pure white.

I like Bruce's idea for diagnosing the problem. Also try another file in Illustrator, but draw it yourself from scratch, a couple of letters on a completely white field, and check that the greyscale reads 0%. See what happens when you print it.

Dave

[tom casey]

Roger that I will try it now.

[Doug Griffith]

Also, if you are placing a bitmap, make sure the bitmap is RGB, the background color is 0,0,0 and the format is a TIFF.

I'd also experiment with Object:Flatten Transparency. Flatten it and see if that helps.

Also, if the text is vector, I'd outline it just to get rid of a variable for error.

[Joe Pelonio]

Sometimes simply adjusting the brightness and contrast will enable you to get rid of the phantom white background problems.

[Ross Lowry]

Hey Tom,

Are you using Corel Draw X5 by chance?
If so go to Epilogs site and they will tell you what you need to do to fix that problem. Its a setting in Corel.
Hope this helps.