Help With a Graphics Problem for Charity

[MilesOhToole]

I have a co-worker, who's 6-year-old nephew was diagnosed with Histocytosis, a rare disease that doctors can only try to treat as a type of cancer.

He's on chemo and limited radiation and the doctors and scientist know little about his ailment.

She wants to make wrist bands or necklaces on a 1X1 inch of wood, with a dark blue ribbon and sell them, with all proceeds going to the awareness of this rare childhood disease.  You might have seen her, as the Today Show promoted the cause, a few months back in New York.

She asked me to help, even though I know very little about graphic design, so I thought I'd pass this to you.

She needs a dark blue ribbon (as she compares it, Cookie Monster Blue) on a white background.

I thought I was pretty smart and downloaded a blue ribbon and loaded it up on Paint.Net.  For some reason, it's printing a black ribbon.  Otherwise, under every other basic program, it has a black background.  I dunno.

Can somebody just make the ribbon print out as "Cookie Monster" blue and the background white?

I've attached a Paint.net source.

Thanks, in advance.



Thank you and I appreciate your help in the awareness of a rare disease that's affecting these small children.

[sicknero]

How strange... have you tried it on a different PC-printer setup?

[Renegade]

If you can convert it to a vector, then you're pretty much done.

Also, you should be using CMYK and not ARGB or RGB. So, convert the colour space, and then that's done, and you should be good to go.

Ideally, you want an EPS or JPG for printing, and not a PNG as often PNGs get the alpha wrong when printing.

Does that help?

For the actual disease, try looking into alternative treatments. Chemo and radiation work on the theory that if you poison the body enough, the bad stuff will die, and with a bit of luck, the person will live. Not a very optimistic way to approach healing. There are plenty of resources out there.

[tomos]

> I thought I was pretty smart and downloaded a blue ribbon and loaded it up on Paint.Net.  For some reason, it's printing a black ribbon.

It is a very dark blue, but part of the problem is probably the printer you're using (most dont deal with subtleties well)

As Renegade says, a vector would be ideal, it would print a lot crisper. I dont have time to make one but if you can find one I could probably modify it (depending on the filetype).

Here's a jpg, in CYMK so it's more WYSIWYG when printing - but only if your monitor plays along :p  [edit] it looks completely different here in FF to in Photoshop, so I guess the programme has to play along as well! Best just to print it and see how it looks, I can modify again if you want. [/edit]

[vlastimil]

As Renegade mentioned, the image contains alpha channel. Most printing tools simply ignore it and you get black color. There are numerous easy ways to fix this. Hard to tell, which one is the easiest. Let's try this: open the image, create a new layer, fill the layer with white color and then swap the positions of the layers (so that the new layer is below the original image). Then print.

Or, if you don't mind me mentioning my own (free) image editor again, it has a smart printing plug-in that handles transparent images properly. You can download it here: http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor After installing or unzipping it, you need to get the print plug-in by clicking on "Install" on the "Print image" line on the "Plug-ins" tab of the "Online" page within the application. The restart the software, open your image and click on "Print" in the "File" menu, choose a printer and you should get what you want.