What is a GOOD color profile for printing?

[betterbannerprinting]

We have a Roland FJ-52 (actually converted by Splash of Color to a solvent printer, basically by adding some heaters) and we strictly use CMYK 4-process on uncoated vinyl materials. Its great using Pantone color guides/bridges to find exact colors for say... a logo. You ignore what you see on screen and just trust the CMYK values on your guide. However, this really doesn't help with the majority of what we do.

I'll design a banner using Photoshop in CMYK mode... it will usually have photographs and other effects, with some solid color here and there for maybe a logo. It is designed on a computer screen, so artistically the colors are matching and looking good. Print it out to our printer and blam... some colors aren't hitting right (depending on what hue/range) and generally everything is darker.

Now, our Pantone guides come in handy here for say... our logo. But what about the rest of the file, with the photographs and various colors? We can't just go through and manually adjust the colors in this fashion. Sure we can tweak all sorts of things, but this puts a time restraint we don't want onto all our projects. All we're really looking for is close color resemblance... not color matching. Print this file out on our Epson Stylus photo inkjet and the colors aren't exact, but they are all very CLOSE to what is on my mid-level LCD screen. This is what we're looking for in our Roland prints, close color resemblance. I'm assuming we can do this through a color profile, but the question is HOW, WHAT profile to use, and WHERE do we get it? (We use an old version of FlexiSIGN-Pro to RIP/Print).

Hope someone out there has a good suggestion! Thanks!

[Ted Harris]

You can pick a paper you want to use and then either use a canned profile for that paper (although that isn't likely to work with your RIP) or create a custom profile for that paper (this assumes you ahve the reflective densitometer needed to creat a custom profile to work with your RIP). Alternatively, while I amnot familiar with the RIP you are using, you should be able to create a profile using the RIP.

[Bruce Watson]

Really, you are in the wrong place. This is a photography forum. You need a wide format printer forum, or a digital color management forum.

I think you'll get better answers there, especially about a Roland running solvent inks. I doubt seriously anyone here has ever made a print with sovent-based inks.

Also, you might want to do some reading. For example, Real World Color Management by Fraser, Bunting, and Murphy.

[Gordon Moat]

The problem with Pantone to CMYK conversion is that many of the Pantone colours are out of range for CMYK. The best you can hope for is a close match, since it will rarely be exact. The specific logo should be a CMYK file that best matches the Pantone to CMYK conversion values, then adjusted for any variance in the CMYK Profile of your Roland. If you don't have the Roland CMYK Profile, you should be able to get that from Roland directly. The real issue here is that your Roland is not a proofing printer, so your goal should be holding good colour contrast and maintaining readability on logos, and not exact matching.

Just to add to this a bit, many of the Pantone Yellows and Greens are outside CMYK values and extremely difficult to match. On client jobs, this should be well explained, and have the client sign off on a closest match, based upon your Pantone to CMYK conversion adjusted to the Roland. The logo should be done separately to the images, and not adjusted at the same time. If you are assembling in PhotoShop, drop the logo in as a separate Layer. Other tips would be for any logos showing a less than 6% Cyan as part of the Pantone to CMYK conversion, with those you need to increase light Cyan values to counter the vinyl whiteness. Best of luck.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio

[Ted Harris]

While I have used a Roland printer Bruce is absolutely correct. You are working in an entirely different world than most of us here work in. You should easily be able to get help from other print houses running Roland printers, contact Roland for info.

[neil poulsen]

Is your monitor color managed? Have you calibrated and profiled it? Can you better define mid-level monitor? LCD monitors aren't nearly as effective per dollar for graphics editing as CRT's. It's more expensive to get the same graphics quality in an LCD, than say a now discontinued LaCie Electron Blue CRT.

Given the materials that you're using, I wonder whether or not the colors that you're printing are all in the gamut of your LCD monitor? Also, are you viewing your printed results under a controlled light source as you compare it with your monitor? (e.g. 5000K.)

Are you using any kind of a profile now? One thing, profiles give you the capability of soft-proofing, and thereby predicting on you monitor how colors will appear when printed. Soft-proofing can also help predict which colors will be out of gamut.

Custom profiles might help. How repeatable is your printer? Do colors vary just on their own, even though you're sending the same signal to your printer? Good repeatability is important to get the advantage of a custom profile. Do you send a CMYK or an RGB image to your RIP? If the latter, it would be easy enough to find someone online that's reliable to build a profile. If the former, consider having someone come to your location to build a profile. There are more variables to specifying a CMYK profile. One has to define the separations. It might be necessary to edit the profile by looking at test images in order to get good results. Whether or not custom profiles help achieve more accurate printing, they can improve soft-proofing quite a lot.

[betterbannerprinting]

While I am trying multiple forums around the net, Bruce, this post has actually gotten the most responses! Perhaps I AM in more of the right place here than the other forums!

Glad to see such a robust user base. I think some of you are missing the big picture here. Calibrating my monitor, the grade of my monitor, my lighting source... these are things that are important when dealing with color matching. We are not looking for that. We are looking for something "close enough". Some colors are ok, they come out "close enough", and others do not.

An example of one of the "do not"s. Take a logo, originally created for web in RGB. RGB of 0,25,169... a CMYK %'s of 100, 94, 0, 1. You take it into Photoshop and convert to CMYK... same CMYK values with an RGB of 39,57,149 to give a semi-accurate reflection of the limitations of CMYK printing on your screen. The two still look CLOSE though, and they are both a deep/light blue. Now, print it out on our Roland and it's a deep purple. Now check out a Pantone color bridge... it will show you that your CMYK values are indeed purple, but if you look at a Pantone Process guide you can still find something that is very close to the original color... but it's not printing that.

Now, print out this same thing on any run of the mill HP or Epson desktop inkjet and your color will be VERY similar to the CMYK file in photoshop on your screen... maybe a bit less saturated. Why? Most likely there is a color profile in these home user printers and not for professional ones. I'm just looking for this type of color profile for us... doesn't have to be perfect, just similar.

Our printer's color output is consistant and we always RIP from CMYK. We currently use no color profile, but are looking for one to solve our problem. We are not interested in taking the time, tools, and money for a custom/exact callibration. We might do that in the future. For now, we just want our blues to stay blue instead of turning purple.

[Tim Lookingbill]

Try this. It's crude but sometimes it works with my minilab. Once you convert to your CMYK space that gives the purple blue, assign other CMYK spaces that make the blue look like the purple without drastically changing other colors. There's a bunch of them that get dumped onto the system in a PS install. Once found, convert from the original RGB file into the new CMYK space and test it out.

I do wonder why inkjet printer users convert to PS commercial press CMYK when those type printers don't even come close to PS's SWOP specs in their ink formulations. Even physics are different. I'm not familiar with Roland but I've read the drivers for these types of printers all print using RGB algorithm mixes when controlling how the ink is dispersed. Basically how it works is even though you send CMYK data it gets converted back to RGB then reconverted to a CMYK combo percentage mix specific and probably embedded within the firmware of the printer to that printer's ink formulation and physicality. Pressing ink on paper behaves differently than spraying ink and PS's CMYK profiles compensate for ink being pressed. I could be wrong in regards to your brand of printer/RIP combination.

Have you tried just sending it RGB data?

[Gordon Moat]

When you are getting more purple results from a mix of Cyan and Magenta, then your Magenta ink is overpowering your Cyan. You can test this by printing a target mixing percentages of each ink. Quite likely something as simple as decreasing Magenta could solve your problems.

When you first mentioned Pantones, I was under the impression you were trying to match colours. Since you are simply using them as a guide, then you need to consider the paper (or canvas) being printed onto. If you held up a swatch from a Pantone Coated Guide next to a Pantone Un-coated Guide, the exact same ink values would provide different results.

Canvas, despite possibly having a coating for inkjet usage, is more like uncoated paper stocks. The reason is that light scatters more on the uneven surface. Your canvas surface will have less reflectivity and less chroma redundancy than uncoated paper from a Pantone swatch book. Every time you change paper (or canvas) you need to adjust your inks.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio