LenticularBlog.com

Impact is key!

Advertising/Marketing companies always look for the most effective way to promote their business.

Lenticular promotes brand and product using motion and animation, not just one still image, which immediately makes it stand out from ordinary print advertising. It is an eye-catching marketing tool that screams for attention. Lenticular has incredible staying power. By captivating and intriguing, any lenticular effect not only increases customer view rates, but it also makes your marketing tools unforgettable. Lenticular products retain customer consciousness for a longer time. This is an efficient and effective way to get your company name remembered to potential customers.

Lenticular is cost-effective and delivers multiple high-impact messages from a single source. It is one of the most affordable, and effective type of printing in the industry. It can also increase product sales. A case study has proven that using lenticular products for promotional items can increase your return on investment up to 40%. That medium of advertising has proven itself by delivering a lot more bang for every dollar spent!

And from a more artistic point of view, lenticular allows you to expand your creative horizons with movement, depth and animation. Lenticular effects will give life and motion to your images.

No doubt that there are clear marketing and artistic benefits in the use of lenticular for advertising.

Ask for free samples, you won’t believe you eyes.

Flip is fun, Animation is awesome… but can we push it to get a movie on lenticular?
The answer is yes!

HOW?

First, we have to choose the best clip of a movie. We select some 5 seconds clips and compare them to each other. The best clip will be extracted from the animation or the movie. From that 5 seconds part, the best 3 seconds will be used.

Here is some important points to know before the selection of a good clip

• Colors - go for vibrant and contrasted colors. NO black & white
• Movement - Up/Down mouvement makes a better effect than Left/Right
  Don’t put too much in the same clip. The simpler is the animation, the better is the effect.
  Ex: The movement of a dog jumping will be better reproduced and more effective than the movement of a dog jumping in the arm of a man who turns around and put the dog back on the ground… limit the movement to one

The best advice - Ask for professionnal advices from the Alteraction team before you start extracting your movie clip. They are the best people to guide you from good to best.

You can send us your movie for advice and/or approval by email of by ftp server.

So lets have a little light, a camera and…. Action !

Usually, commercial printers use document digitalized at 300 to 400 dpi. With that resolution, you can make plates at a resolution of 2400 dpi for a 150 lpi screen. What does LPI means? LPI is short for Lines Per Inch, which is the number of dots per linear inch. It is basically the screen used to get the ink from the plate to the blanket and to the paper. The more fine the screen is, the more sharp your print will be, the less you will see the pattern. Generally, the higher the LPI, the better the photo (unless it is higher than the printer can allow).

Here at Alter-Ego, we don’t use that screening technique. We use stochastique screening. A sophisticated screening technology producing a continuous tone that ensures a better, more reliable production for high impact images. Very few printers in canada have the expertise and the technology to print with stochastic screening. At Alter-Ego we print in stochastic 99% of the time. We mostly use a stochastic screen of 20 micron, that is basically equivalent to 500 lpi… way higher than most of the competition.

For the lenticular printing, we tried a lot of combination of resolution and screening, and we settle for 800 lpi. Yep! the highest resolution possible now. No printer ever print at that resolution anywhere. On paper it is almost impossible to print a 800 lpi screen that stay sharp and stable, but on a lenticular plastic lens we can do it.

Alter-Ego is using the Alteraction unique process to get the best quality from the computer to the plastic lens.

Ask for free samples, you won’t believe you eyes.

Printing lenticular on an offset press it not easy. Alter-Ego with the AlterAction process has developed a unique way to do that.

At Alter-Ego we don’t only print lenticular. We start in 2004 to print on Ez-fix, an electrostatic plastic film that sticks on all clean surfaces. At that time, Alter-Ego was one of the few to be approved to print on that kind of material. Now, with the advance of technology and techniques, Re-fix has been added to the great line of products that we offer. Re-Fix is one side coated with a special adhesive that sticks to all clean surfaces for up to 2 years WITHOUT damaging it.

With a very strong experience in plastic offset printing, going from there to lenticular was not that big of a step. The plastic sheets are different, but for the press it is basically the same.

At Alter-Ego, we have the tools and the experience to handle special plastic printing… and we continue to innovate.

Alter Ego is proud to have the Ex-fix, the Re-fix and the Lenticular as there high end produts. Alter-Ego is also a premium commercial print shop that can handle every printed projects. From business cards to annual reports and art reproductions.

Contact us at Alter-Ego

Here is a VERY frequently asked question. And as a matter of fact it has a huge importance for the chosen effect of your lenticular piece.

The lens is like a little magnifying glass, so it shows what’s underneath, and your eyes are pretty close from one an other (less then 3″ apart), so when you look at the vertically printed lenticular, each eyes don’t see the same group of lens. And when the lens is horizontally printed, your eyes see the same group of lens at a certain angle.

For exemple; for a Flip, you like to see image A then image B. So you need to have the lens horizontally printed so each eyes see the same thing AAA then BBB.

For an Animation, you have a lot of images, and again each eyes must see image 1 then 2 then 3 and so on… You must control what each eye see, so the lens will be printed horizontally.

For the 3D effect, it’s different, you have to trick the eyes to see something a bit different from each eyes. So the lens must be vertically printed. We use the shift in the lens to trick the brain. That’s why we can not have a 3D effect with a horizontally printed lens.

What will happen if we make a flip A/B and have the lens vertically printed?… It will flip, but not as sharp as it should be. Your right eye will see something a little before the left, so ghosting will appear.

Sometime we have no choice. So we can modify your document or change the lens type to maximize the effect, and reduce ghosting.

It’s all about the basic proprieties of the lens. Your lenticular consultant will be happy to offer you the best advises for your project.

click here to contact us

Definition : The process of striping a sequence of images for animation effects, or views for 3D effects, and arranging them in order to a given pitch to be printed and viewed through a properly positioned and aligned sheet of lenticular lens material.

Interlacing is the key to the lenticular technology. The software place the frames in order and creates the file that you will print. It is mostly a mathematical formula that slices images to the right width and arrange them accordingly.

For a flip effect of 2 images, the first band is a strip from image 1, the second from image 2, the third from image 1, and so on. The software then saves the interlaced image in a file ready for printing. An image print is now produced whose characteristics represent a map of the interlaced images and which includes one or more desired visual effects. A very high end prepress system and RIP is used to process this file to print.

Interlaced file size: Number of Frames x Proofing Pitch LPI of the Lens x (resolution÷300) = PPI. For many lenticular document, it is usual to see file size as big as 500 MB and way over that.

Different “pitches”

Mechanical pitch: The exact physical count of lenticules per inch. Pitch value is measured in Lenticules Per Inch (LPI).

Visual pitch: the distance at which we have the best visual result.

Prototype pitch: determined from the visual pitch, is the pitch in which we must interlace the document to acquire an appropriate prototype.

Printing press pitch: determined from the visual pitch, is the pitch in which we must interlace the document to acquire an appropriate final print.

Why different pitches?

Mechanical pitch: for exemple, a 75 LPI lens is not exactly composed of 75 lenses by inch. The pitch is more of 75.52. So, it is composed exatly of 75.52 lenses by inch.

Prototype pitch vs. printing press pitch: The lens strips are round and on a 20″ X 28″ lens format it is impossible at a short distance to visualise the center of each strips (necessary data for interlacing). We use a linear sample, a “pitch tester”. With this tool we determine at which resolution the pitch is locate for a maximum visual effect.

WHy do we have different pitches for the prototype and for the final print ?

The prototype is an ink jet print laminated manually on a lens. The final print is printed directly on the lens. These 2 kinds of print are diffrent in many ways (paper/plastic lens, resolution…) So for all different kind of printing, there’s a different pitch.

• Conventionnal offset printing (directly on the lens)
  For medium to large print run and for small print format. Exceptionnal quality (resolution up to 800 lpi). Drying time from 3 to 5 day.
• UV offset printing (directly on the lens)For large to really large print run. Good enough quality (resolution up to 200 lpi). Instant drying.
• Ink jet printing (print applied on the lens)
  For prototypes and small print run (all print format). With a RIP resolution of 720 dpi, it’s difficult to have a good result with a high resolution lens. The ink jet print has to be perfectly align with the lens (what is not always easy). The print as to be applied to the lens with a clear self-adhesive thin coating. However, with the higher resolution ink jet print and and low resolution lens, the result can be good quality.
• Ink jet printing with solvent (if flatbed, directly on the lens)
  For small print run and large print format. The result is disappointing. The dot is big, the RIP resolution is not good enough and it is difficult to print in register on the lens.
• Flatbed UV Ink jet printing (directly on the lens)
  For small to medium print run of big size print (up to 5′ x 9′). The quality is good enough. RIP resolution can be up to 1500 dpi. Instant drying. The lens can be put outside.
• Indigo digital printing (directly on the lens)
  Rarely used. This printing system is expensive and limited to a 24 pts resolution. For small print run only.
• Photographic printing (print applied on the lens)
  Rarely used. Too old technology, too expensive and with a limited resolution.
• Digital proofing systems (Waterproof ou Kodak Approval) (print applied on the lens)
  Really expensive but with an exceptionnal quality. Minimum of 2400 dpi and up to 400 lpi. The equipment is expensive and the processing is very slow.