Yes, contact us at (316)838-2000 for custom printing requests.

There are many new wrap vinyls available from 3M, Avery, Oracal, LG Chem, MacTac and others. All of these vinyls are very advanced compared to the ‘old’ days of premium cast. Get one with Air Egress technology and you are well on your way to success. The one to choose between these companies will depend upon your installation skill level and your personal preference.

Choose a laminate that is as high a quality as the base film you intend to print on. Keep cast film and cast laminate together to avoid problems later on. A cast vinyl with a calendared laminate will shrink at different rates and cause problems which will often result in a re-do.. Avoid those problems by choosing the highest quality base wrap vinyl and laminate and you’ll simply avoid most of the problems that will appear.

Roland, Mimaki, Mutoh, HP and Fuji are the 5 main printers used in the vinyl business. They are all good and offer unique features. Some prefer a separate printer / cutter combination so they can keep the printer printing non-stop and use the cutter when they need it without interrupting the printing process. 

There are several different types and brands of laminators on the market.  Chose yours based on your needs. Changing between glossy and matte laminate on a single laminator can be time consuming, so many shops invest in 2 laminators using one for gloss laminate and the other for matte. 

We recommend custom built PC’s for designing for large format output.  You’ll want multiple multi-threaded, powerful CPU’s, lots of RAM and a scratch disk at the minimum.  High end graphics cards aren’t necessary. 

We recommend a separate “Design” and “RIP” station.  Your RIP computer does not need to be extremely powerful to process and RIP files to the printer.  

When you ‘mask’ or use a ‘clipping mask’ on a bitmap, the entire bitmap is still there, you just can’t see it because of the clipping mask. If you put a lot of those into one file, the file can quickly get to 1GB+ and beyond in size. The resulting huge print file can take a long time to RIP on a slow computer. Designing in Adobe Photoshop and then saving it as a single high-quality .jpg or flattened .tiff will reduce these file sizes tremendously making them easy to open, save and RIP.

We offer Photoshop training for vinyl that will teach you the basics of killer design for vinyl in Photoshop.  Our training takes you through the interface and has you completing a design in Photoshop before bringing your work back to Flexi, Signlab, or directly to your RIP for output. 

72 dpi resolution of the full-scale print image is the wrap industry standard. If your artwork is created at full scale 72dpi it will print beautifully. If your artwork has to be blown up from 72dpi, it could result in a rough and pixelated print. Aurora Graphics artwork is created at full scale. (You may have to reduce the scale in most cases.) And the 720 X 720 on the printer settings is actually lines per inch and has nothing to do with the resolution of the print file itself.

Gray and Red are two of the most difficult colors to hit with most RIP’s This is the fault of the RIP and not the image itself. Contact your RIP mfg. for support. 

Most newer 7+ color printers actually enable you to use light black inks to more accurately hit gray-scale output.  

• We recommend using Pro Vehicle Outlines templates for production design. 
• You can also create your own templates from photographs.  Photographic templates look good, especially for mock up and presentation, but they are not very accurate for production.

• For bitmap/raster image editing we highly recommend Adobe Photoshop. 
• For vector image editing and cutcontour creation we recommend Corel Draw.
• Other great design programs include Flexi, Signlab, Sign Wizard and Corel Photo-Paint.
• Free open source design software choices include Inkscape and Gimp.  These are powerful tools but do not lend themselves well to professional production.

You can use Photoshop Elements but it doesn’t have most of the functionality of the full version of Photoshop. We recommend the full version.

• We support everything we sell, but we don’t sell Photoshop. Consult your owners manual, the on-line HELP menu, or check out our Pro Designer Photoshop Training DVDs to learn how to use it’s features.
• Be sure and check out our tutorials and blog for awesome design, printing and installation techniques!

• We support everything we sell, but we don’t sell Flexi. Consult your owners manual, the on-line HELP menu, or take a Flexi training class to learn how to use it’s features.
• Be sure and check out our tutorials and blog for awesome design, printing and installation techniques!

We support everything we sell, but we don’t sell SignLab. Consult your owners manual, the on-line HELP menu, or take a SignLab training class to learn how to use it’s features.

Photoshop 7 or older has a finite pixel limit. Phostoshop CS and newer doesn’t have that pixel limitation. Upgrade your old version of Photoshop to open larger files.  

Your computer may not be powerful enough to handle large file sizes.

Our machines are dual-quad core 64-bit machines specifically built for high-end graphic intensive applications such as Adobe Photoshop among others. With the right machine, working with these huge bitmap files is much easier and faster. ‘Off the shelf’ machines aren’t built for the demanding environment you and I work in. We recommend having a custom computer built.  

Yes, Aurora Graphics can modify existing designs or create them from the ground up to your specifications.  Please contact us by phone or email for more information.

(316) 838-2000

sales@auroragraphics.net