Hal Hinderliter

Learning About Lenticular, part 2
November 13, 2007

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Question: I’d like to know how to print 3-D and/or flip-flop images. Can you recommend a good (not too expensive) software and a supplier of the lenticular?

Leo (Vermeulen)

For our second post on this topic, let’s hear the pressroom perspective from Michael Santagata, Plant Manager at Tukaiz, a marketing communications production services company in Franklin Park, IL:

“The biggest thing you have to worry about when printing lenticular is that when you’re creating the flip, you have to match the lens,” cautioned Santagata. “It’s absolutely essential you have to do a pitch test to check the angles of the actual batch of lens you’re using.”

Running the Pitch Test
“A pitch test plate is just a bunch of lines, it looks a lot like a gray scale,” Santagata revealed. “Once you’ve put the pitch test on press to verify the lens info, then you care able to prepare the files in prepress using the correct interlace information.” He noted that the characteristics of the lens change from batch to batch, even when the material is all sourced from the same supplier. “You can’t do a test on one lot of stock then run it on another, you can’t even wait too long after you’ve done the test to run the job, because the pitch can change.”

Printing on Plastic
“We print on every substrate you can think of, so lenticular stock has never been an issue for us. It sounds more difficult than it is,” laughed Santagata, “We almost never have problems with it.” When the experienced press crew at Tukaiz runs into an issue, it’s typically due to radical differences within the interlaced image. “When you have a lot of lights and darks from one flip to the next, you might have some ghosting, so you might have to alter the file,” Santagata counseled. “We might have to change the color scheme or manipulate the artwork to get rid of the ghosting.”

As to suppliers, Tukaiz has shopped around but buys most of their lenses from a favorite source. “There’s a couple of vendors that we’ve dealt with, but mainly we use LPC World in Canada,” admitted Santagata. “Their service is fantastic, the pricing is fair and the quality is excellent. Minimum order is 1,500 sheets, and it runs about $1 a sheet.”

Digital Proofing and Printing for Lenticular
“The biggest challenge with lenticular has always been the proofing cycle,” declared Santagata, “We used to make a Kodak proof and then laminate that to the lens; the results weren’t that great and it was typically about a week to make a good proof. But now we’re able to pull a digital proof on our HP Indigo because it can print directly onto the lens; we also use it for short-run lenticular projects.”

Tukaiz is bullish about the opportunities that digital brings to the lenticular process. “We tested the Indigo for about a year, and now we’ve been running it live for about two months,” said Santagata. “The results are almost better than on the conventional press. I’d say that four out of every ten of our lenticular jobs are now printed on the Indigo.” 

Posted by Hal Hinderliter on November 13, 2007 | Comments (0)