HP Inkjet strange print defect - blue borders on cropped images

[nekowaiidesu]

Hi all,

Got a client who prints little pictures of fruit and veg to use on the cash-register keys. His old printer did this job just fine. He recently got an HP 8710 or 8715 and it is printing a very blue border around the images which were cropped and put onto transparent backgrounds.

The strange thing is, the images were not cropped off a blue background. When I view the images up close in mspaint, there are no blue pixels - mostly shades of gray (I'm assuming shadows that are cropped) so why on earth would the printer make these bright blue?


edit: some more info - old printer was an HP 8600. New one is an 8715. Images were all .png cropped with transparent background and put into excel spreadsheet.


See image:
IMG_5636.jpg

[qbert69]

Hi all,

Got a client who prints little pictures of fruit and veg to use on the cash-register keys. His old printer did this job just fine. He recently got an HP 8710 or 8715 and it is printing a very blue border around the images which were cropped and put onto transparent backgrounds.

The strange thing is, the images were not cropped off a blue background. When I view the images up close in mspaint, there are no blue pixels - mostly shades of gray (I'm assuming shadows that are cropped) so why on earth would the printer make these bright blue?


edit: some more info - old printer was an HP 8600. New one is an 8715. Images were all .png cropped with transparent background and put into excel spreadsheet.


See image:
IMG_5636.jpg

Not sure how well your client is versed in graphics, but the icon images with "transparent" backgrounds are for one, very low resolution. Secondly, the background, the blue that is seen hasn't been completely removed! To do it correctly, the images should be a higher resolution, the edges "anti-aliased" and the background "knocked out" properly, leaving a faded grayscale edge (instead of color!) for a proper transparent transition to a chosen background color layer. To get an idea of what I am talking about, reference the below links!:

adobe photoshop - How do I apply anti-aliasing to the edges of a layer? - Graphic Design Stack Exchange

adobe photoshop - Convert anti-aliasing on color to anti-alias on transparent - Graphic Design Stack Exchange

https://www.digitalanarchy.com/primatte/main.html

Good Luck!

[nekowaiidesu]

Secondly, the background, the blue that is seen hasn't been completely removed!

He runs a fruit and veg shop, not a design studio, so I doubt he's a photoshop master (as can be seen by his choice of low res images and poor magic-tool cropping lol)

Nevertheless, the images were NOT cropped off blue backgrounds.

They were cropped off mostly white backgrounds, onto a transparent layer and I think some of them were anti-alias'd which may cause the problem.

It seems to me that the blue appears where the edges are anti-aliased / blurred. I suspect that the printer understands 100% transparency okay, but something is going wrong for the blurred edge where it is partially transparent.


tl:dr: the blue is not any 'left over' from bad cropping - the semi-transparent edges are being interpreted as solid blue for some unknown reason.


Funnily enough I had this exact machine in my workshop: no faults of course. All works fine. Not sure if it's software or PC's colour profiles or what... His business is way out of town, so a callout is not really an option. He's inclined to get a refund on this machine now and purchase another. Hassles for me.

Even re-did his file and rasterized it so that there is no alpha channel to worry about and he's still not happy because he doesn't want to have to do that himself if he needs to change the doc.

[qbert69]

He runs a fruit and veg shop, not a design studio, so I doubt he's a photoshop master (as can be seen by his choice of low res images and poor magic-tool cropping lol)

Nevertheless, the images were NOT cropped off blue backgrounds.

They were cropped off mostly white backgrounds, onto a transparent layer and I think some of them were anti-alias'd which may cause the problem.

It seems to me that the blue appears where the edges are anti-aliased / blurred. I suspect that the printer understands 100% transparency okay, but something is going wrong for the blurred edge where it is partially transparent.


tl:dr: the blue is not any 'left over' from bad cropping - the semi-transparent edges are being interpreted as solid blue for some unknown reason.


Funnily enough I had this exact machine in my workshop: no faults of course. All works fine. Not sure if it's software or PC's colour profiles or what... His business is way out of town, so a callout is not really an option. He's inclined to get a refund on this machine now and purchase another. Hassles for me.

Even re-did his file and rasterized it so that there is no alpha channel to worry about and he's still not happy because he doesn't want to have to do that himself if he needs to change the doc.

hmmmm......maybe use BullZip

Bullzip.com - Free PDF Printer

print to a PDF which would "flatten" the layers/objects and open again in Adobe Acrobat and print to the printer! I've had to deal with this kind of crap on Windows and Mac! It helps to figure out a simple workaround and the PDF method just might do it for you!... Good Luck!

[Iowatech]

This is just some stupid stuff from back in the analog days, but that kind of looks like the shadow from the edge of the paper those images are printed on. I saw that a lot back in the day with clip art. The usual solution for that back then was to tear the picture out of the sheet it was printed on rather than cutting it out with scissors.
Sorry if this was a waste of time.

[theengel]

Maybe he messed up somewhere in the feathering?