Tiled Printing, Outer Glow, and Blue Edge Line

Hello all,
I have a large map which I am printing using 3x3 tiling to give me 9 printed sheets. It's seems the only way I can get the resolution I want when the map is printed - its roughly 27" wide by 25" high. Eventually I want to have it printed as a wall poster. I can't get CC3+ to render the entire map at once at anything close to the resolution I need - or I've not found a way to do so yet.

I have a body of water with islands. The islands (all the land masses actually) have an outer glow of lighter blue for a gradual transition effect.

Several of the islands are quite near one of the vertical tiling divisions but their land mass is entirely within that tiling division. I notice that the glow effect is not rendered on the adjacent printed tile though it should be and in fact is when viewed in CC3+ (obviously as no tiling is occurring). I assume that it may be due to the fact that each tile is processed individually and has no knowledge of the nearby island land mass on the other tile, no glow is rendered in that adjacent tile. The effect is that there is a hard line transition from darker blue to lighter blue.

I've attached a small PNG to illustrate

There are probably several solutions such as:
1. Move the 2 islands to straddle the tiling line and thus the outer glow would be rendered in both tiles. This is do-able. Not ideal but do-able.
2. Use another sheet with objects and effects to simulate an outer glow. Also perhaps doable. Might take some experimenting.
3. Eliminate the outer glow effect entirely. Not preferable.
4. Change the tiling to 4x3 or 4x4 and hope that the tiling divisions work out well.

But I'm open to other ideas from those more experienced; perhaps someone has run into this before. Seeking sage wisdom and advice from all.

Also ... has anyone else noticed that when printed in tiled form, each of the tiles' 'cut' edges has a line, perhaps 1 pixel wide, perhaps more, that is rendered incorrectly. It appears to have a blue-ish hue in some parts. I have to crop those images before printing or merging into one large PNG.

Many thanks in advance,
-Mike

Comments

  • I haven't messed with printing from CC3+ yet, but instead of tiling in CC3, have you considered just rendering the entire map as an image and letting your printer actually do the tiling instead?

    R A Jacobs
  • AEIOUAEIOU Newcomer
    I print to PDF as tiled image with 5% overlap and then I paste back together in Photoshop. I usually get one quadrant that looks like your image. For me I just adjust the brightness on that map layer and I can make it look perfect in seconds. Irritating that I need to do that though....

    Main reason for printing tiled is that you can get much better resolution. I'm considering moving from 2x2 to 3x3 to see how that does.
  • GatharGathar Traveler
    Maybe using a software that automatically corrects photos when stitching them together might be another option? I don't know how they would work with artificial images...
  • Thanks to all who replied. Real life pre-empted mapping for a bit.

    @R A Jacobs: I've not tried that and didn't know that printers had that capability. Unfortunately I have to render in tiles to got sufficient resolution.

    @AEIOU: Hmm, had not tried that. Making changes is time consuming. A redraw with effects on for my map takes on the order of 15 seconds, with effects off, 5 seconds. Of course I do a lot of work with effects off and many sheets hidden. Each print process takes at least 15 minutes. But it might be worth a try. I found that 3x3 using A4 paper and 1200dpi with a 'Print resolution divided by' of 3 and 1% overlap seems to work pretty well. PNG is quite large but when printed looks very good - very sharp. Lot of work though :-)

    @Gathar: Interesting idea but I would think that the correction algorithm would have no way of knowing that it's an effect and be able to render it correctly.

    Good ideas all. Still tinkering with it. Thanks to all!

    -Mike
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