I created bus cards in pages and when I recieved them from the printer the colors were very muted and washed out compared to my monitor. How can I fix this when I reorder them so I get the colors that I want?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
You can not print what you see on your monitor.
The monitor has a very rich color set which is displayed in glowing RGB pixels.
Your printed Business Cards use CMYK inks and how saturated those colors appear depends on the paper stock that they were printed on and how well you adjusted the colors to suit the paper.
Chances are you printed RGB images on an uncoated paper stock. The RGB colors were converted to the duller CMYK and the ink was absorbed into the paper. Also you probably used a cheap commercial printer and got what you paid for.
To get better color you need to know more about print and production, print selected converted CMYK colors onto coated paper stock and then will get closer to the result you expected, though it will never look like your screen.
Peter
> You can not print what you see on your monitor.
This is technically incorrect. If the user has the correct ICC PRTR Printer profile for the printing condition, if the user has a calibrated colour display that is correctly profiled, if the user sets up the correct rendering intents for the conversion from captured scanner/camera RGB to press CMYK (Perceptual) and from press CMYK to proof display RGB (Colourimetric with or without media white point simulation), and if the user has a correct viewing condition in the studio (either a viewing lamp or a viewing box), then a match from the display to the proof print and the press print is possible. Similarly, an inkjet proof print and a press print may be matched with a spectrophotometric control within something like dE 3.
However, it is technically correct that a paper with an uncoated surface is diffusing and causes the light that reflects off the surface to scatter. A simple physics experiment: Pick a colour transparency photograph, hold it above an uncoated and diffusing surface, and then hold it above a coated surface. The saturation will seem higher with the coated surface. By the bye, it is this difference in how light diffuses that drove the conversion from soluble paints to non-soluble paints with pigments suspended in siccative linseed and nut oils from about 1420 to about 1470 when oil on canvas painting emerged. Siccative suspension vehicles, and siccative varnishes, produced higher saturation than soluble vehicles.
>To get better color you need to know more about print and production,
That is correct: If you can't ride a bicycle, and if others you are with also can't ride a bicycle, a certain percentage of those riding together are highly likely to have accidents.
> print selected converted CMYK colors onto coated paper stock and then will get closer to the result you expected,
Since ISO-IEC 12647 for international reference printing conditions was approved, swatch books for have been available for viewing of physical swatches. US printing looks to US national standards and not to ISO, but there are similar printed swatches available from GATF, the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, if memory serves. Be aware, however, that if the percentages in the swatch samples are not precisely matched in preparing the printing surface in a page description language, and if the press is not configured and calibrated for the correct ISO printing condition, then the colours will not match. Of course, this is also true of non-process swatches such as Pantone.
/hh
Thank you for your help. They are printing on non coated paper and adding the coating afterwards. They are asking me to submit the colors in CYNK format. How can I do that from pages? Will choosing web safe colors from the graphic inspector help? My gray scale slider is at 43% should I change that?
crystalk999 wrote:
They are asking me to submit the colors in CYNK format. How can I do that from pages?
Regards,
Jerry
Henrik Holmegaard wrote:
> You can not print what you see on your monitor.
This is technically incorrect.
Henrik, don't confuse the O.P. There is no way you can print exactly what you see on the screen, paper will never match that. What you are saying is that you can approximate what you see on screen, an entirely different proposition.
There is a considerable amount of skill to ensuring a good print job and it is clear that you do not have the knowledge or skill to do that.
All you can do is try to make a better job of it than you have.
Web Safe colors is an old fashioned notion that as it says is only for the Web and has nothing to do with print.
The greyscale slider is simply to help you choose greys ie percentages of the black ink and is not relevant here.
You need to create all the colors you use with the CMYK sliders and use coated paper stock to get stronger colors. The coated stock has a layer of kaolin clay on the surface that stops the ink soaking down into the paper fibres. Kaolin is the same material that is used to make porcelain china and gives a nice white background. The higher the quality paper stock the more kaolin has been applied.
I advise restricting yourself to combinations of cyan, magenta and yellow for colors with generally 100% of one of those or at least a high percentage to get strong clean colors. Avoid black except for darker colors.
eg Red is 100 magenta + 100 yellow
Green is 100 cyan + 100 Yellow
Good blues are harder to get but start with either 100% or 75% cyan and add a good amount of magenta
Bright blue 100 cyan + 20 magenta
Dark blue 100 cyan + 50 magenta
Dark purple 100 cyan + 100 magenta
Good browns and tans are difficult.
Obviously I can go much deeper into this subject but the end result has a lot of variables and getting a good result is a craft and an art.
Peter
If you are looking at the strong intense colors you may have seen on other people's business cards, these probably were not achieved using cmyk printing and are not possible using Pages.
To get strong solid colors designers use what are called Spot Color inks. These are specially mixed pigmented inks, usually using the Pantone color system. They can make colors that are impossible with cmyk printing. Not just intense colors, but also metallic, pearlescent and fluorescent colors as well as spot varnishes.
The cmyk method is an illusion created by having a pattern of tiny different size dots of only 4 basic inks. Whilst flexible and necessary where there are photo like images, it is unfortunately a considerable compromise for everything else.
Particularly problematic is because the cmyk is a dot pattern it is never a complete coverage of the paper, little bits of white need to show through. The dots also make it fuzzy without crisp edges, this is particularly bad when printing fine linework as in small size type. Unfortunately we now have a generation of designers and consumers who think the poor result is normal.
Peter
> Will choosing web safe colors from the graphic inspector help?
1. The term 'Web safe colours' refers to colourimetry codes that are inside the colourimetry space of sRGB which is the default colourimetry space of HTML. The industrial specification for sRGB was published in 1996 and is based on the colourimetry space of HDTV.
When you prepare for printing in Apple Mac OS X, you are preparing to print using Adobe PDF. You specify colourimetry in a colourimetry space of your choice, in OS X 10.5 and higher you specify in Generic RGB Profile which is equivalent to sRGB.
In the Adobe imaging model, a distinction is made between colour specification and colour rendering. You have specified your source colourimetry space, which determines the nature of colours and the number of colours that you can specify colourimetrically.
You now need to specify the colourimetry space within which you want to render. In other words, you have your input profile, and now you need your output profile. You are supposed to be told what output profile or rendering profile to use by your print provider.
> They are asking me to submit the colors in CYNK format. How can I do that from pages?
What you are being told is unfortunately typical. You are being told to figure out for yourself what the colourimetry of the printing is, and to convert to raw colourants that will render by the numbers in the RIP Raster Image Processor.
If you want to specify in raw colourants, then open the Apple Colour Picker, select the object for which you want to specify raw colourants, click the Source Colour Space icon on the left in the Colour Picker, and select DeviceCMYK.
This is only supported for graphic objects that you draw in Apple Pages, not for graphic objects that were drawn or painted in other applications, saved to disk, and placed into Apple Pages from disk. Be aware that without a colourimetric specification for the printing condition, you have no information of what colourimetry is printable.
/hh
> Particularly problematic is because the cmyk is a dot pattern it is never a complete coverage of the paper, little bits of white need to show through.
In printing, one distinguishes between a separations device and a composite device. An example of a separations device is an offset lithographic press or a gravure press where the colourants (inks) are applied to the substrate (sheet-fed or roll-fed paper) at points that are some distance apart. An example of a composite device is an inkjet where the colourants (inks) are sprayed through nozzles that sit together on a carriage.
The trouble with a separations device is the paper path, that is, because of the distance between the points where colourant is applied, misregistration may occur. Thus small graphic objects such as 10pt Garamond will seem to have unsharp contours because the inks do not sit precisely on top of one another. Another problem with misregistration is that 10pt Garamond in one colour on a background of another colour may show the paper through. In preparing to print on a separations device, therefore, one traps the inks. Either the trapping may be done manually/visually, or the trapping may be done automatically. This is part of the user interface for the ISO 15930 PDF/X-3 implementation in the Apple ColorSync Utility.
/hh
Jerry,
The Apple Color Picker has one set of UI controls for the colourant format (RGB, CMYK, Gray) and another set of UI controls for the colourimetry that specifies what colours are formed by the colourants (the Source Colour Space icon). If and only if you choose DeviceRGB for RGB colourant format, DeviceCMYK for CMYK colourant format, DeviceGray for Gray colourant format will you get raw colourant numbers. In all other cases, the colourant format you choose will become what Adobe calls your source 'Working Space', that is, if you choose RGB colourant format for specifying colourimetry, the system will give you RGB as UI channels and the default ICC source colour space for RGB which is Generic RGB Profile aka sRGB. For CMYK as UI channels the default ICC source colour space is Generic CMYK Profile aka ANSI CGATS TR001.
If you read the original developer documentation for Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Objects, note that a choice of editing or working colourimetry space is discussed in terms of user friendliness. Another factor is the size and shape of the source colourimetry space, for instance, the colourimetry for 100% Cyan in ISO 12647 for glossy paper is outside the colourimetry of sRGB, and outside the colourimetry of your current display in all likelihood. A photographer working with a good high gamut inkjet process works with colours her display cannot form, but which her inkjet process can. Adobe Photoshop has a setting for display desaturation that attempts to address the problem (unaddressable, really).
/hh
> What you are saying is that you can approximate what you see on screen, an entirely different proposition.
No, what I am saying is that if one uses a spectrophotometer, an ICC profiling package, a good studio display, a good studio printer, a controlled studio viewing condition, and a correct rendering intent configuration, one can preview in the softproof what the print will look like.
/hh
Henrik
That means still only optimally approximating what you see on screen.
It is not going to match what you see on a glossy iMac screen.
Not unless you are printing to stained glass windows!
Peter
> don't confuse the O.P. There is no way you can print exactly what you see on the screen, paper will never match that
> That means still only optimally approximating what you see on screen.
General questions on ICC colour management can be posted on at www.color.org for answer by Dr Phillip Green of the London College of Printing. Specific questions on ICC colour management implementation in Apple Mac OS X can be posted to the Apple ColorSync Users list or to Apple Discussions for particular application products.
In general, with a photographic print (to reflective paper or transparent film) and a separations camera (Esko, Agfa, Kodak) in the nineteen-seventies or a colour separations scanner (Crosfield, ****, Screen, Scitex) in the nineteen-eighties, there was a viewable graphic as reference between the photographer and the lithographer.
Interchange formats for images (TIFF, JPEG, PNG and more), for page descriptions (PostScript, PDD, PDF and more), and internationalised connectivity infrastructure have brought about a situation where colourants in pixel patterns and scalable vector shapes are distributed in blind interchange.
In a digital scan or digital camera capture, there is no viewable graphic on a physical medium. There is only colourant data in a colourant format (emissive and additive RGB, reflective and subtractive CMY, CMYK, CcMmYK, Gray, for instance).
Australian metaphysics aside, it is an impossible proposition that there be no interchange of colourimetry interchange in order that interchange of colourants be supported by specification of the colours intended to be formed by those colourants on digital graphic devices.
A photographer working in Australia has no possible way of anticipating what devices are available to audiences in Austria, or what configuration those devices have (gamma setting for displays, paper selection for printers, for instance).
What the photographer does is Create Once, Convert Many: Colour correct the exposure using the ICC device profile for the capture device, convert into a suitable interchange space, and don't change the colourants on disk ever again.
The ICC colour management system will pluc the input colourimetry specification into a subregion of the PCS Profile Connection Space, plug the output colourimetry specification into a subregion of the PCS Profile Connection Space, and task the CMM Colour Management Module to convert the pixels.
The display used by the photographer is the destination device in the photographer's ColourWorld and the displays used by the audience are the destination devices in the ColourWorlds they create with the device profiles for their custom configurations.
The display colour space is not interchanged, it is only invoked locally for - surprise, surprise - display. The interchange colourimetry space defines which colours can be output, because it is impossible to output colours that cannot be defined in the interchange colourimetry space.
If the CIEL*a*b* D50 colourimetry for 10% Cyan on glossy paper under ISO 12647 cannot be defined in sRGB, then the photographer who chooses sRGB as interchange colourimetry space cannot provide that colour even if the colour in principle could be rendered on a given device.
Precisely the same pertains for transliteration in small character sets such as ANSI X3.4–American Standard Code for Information Interchange. For instance, ASCII cannot input æ, Æ as in Hans Christian Andersens Keiserens nye Klæder, Eng. The Emperor's New Robes, so æ, Æ cannot be interchanged.
Whether the user locally has a good viewing condition, a mediocre viewing condition or a madcap viewing condition is immaterial to the working of the ICC colour management system for interchange of colourimetry information.
Colour management as such is not a craft or art, but a science. Art is part of the science of colour management in that there is no science that says which way is best for vectoring colours outside a destination gamut into that destination gamut.
Thus no two profiling packages will vectorize out of gamut colours precisely the same, nor will any two colour correctors. Similarly, no two type designers will vectorize (kern) interglyph spacing the same, because that is part of visual art and not part of science.
In general, please post proper technical information on ICC colour management. Posting that colour communication for blind interchange in information society is impossible is helpful to no-one, and is simply non-sense from the start.
/hh
How to fix colors in a pages file so they are correct when printed professionally
