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How To Prevent Excess White Underbase With White Choke Features!

choke the white in the ripChoking the white helps stop the white from peeking out from under the design. The white can peek out for different reasons, either through mechanical misalignment or when the white bleeds or spreads. 

To solve this, we can choke or shrink the white to stop the white peeking out by using the choke feature for the underbase in the processing options.  

To change the choke on a job:

  1. Select the job.
  2. Click “Color Adjust” in the bottom right. This will open the “Easy Color Adjustments” dialog.
  3. Select the correct layer from the layer dropdown on the top right.
  4. In the Underbase section, select the appropriate choke value to shrink the white.

We recommend a value of 2 or 3 pixels for color substrates and up to 5 pixels for black substrates. Using values greater than 5 can cause issues such as a stroke appearing, and if you need a value greater than 5, you should look at the printer and mechanical issues such as head alignment. 

You can use the Queue Wizard – Set White Choke to print variations of the choke value to help you find the best setting and then apply this to the print mode to be used with all future jobs. You can view this process in our video: Setting The White Choke Amount with the Digital Factory Queue Wizard

To set a default choke for the white manually you’ll need to set the choke in the print mode:

  1. Go to the Devices menu.
  2. Select Manage Print Modes. This will open the Print Mode Manager dialog.
  3. Select the print mode you would like to edit.
  4. Double click or select the edit icon at the top of the dialog.
  5. Select the layer for which you want to adjust the choke.
  6. Select the Processing options tab.
  7. Select the choke value from the dropdown list found to the right of Choke the Prime “Stop White prime peeking out” found midway down the dialog. 

When making changes to a printmode, you need to reselect the printmode in the queue before the changes will be applied to the queue. The choke is a printmode feature, if you change the value of the choke in the queue instead of the print mode you will lose the choke when you change print modes.

To see this process in action, check out our video below: