Questions & Answers

[ctaulbee]

This question comes up a lot and the biggest thing that can affect that, is the fact that you "see" artwork on your screen in RGB colors, but your printer "prints" them in CMYK colors, and while there is some overlap in the color gamuts of each that translation (based on your color profiles settings) can still really affect, how a print verses a view will compare.

See the charts below for how these differ.



Ranges or "Gamut" for each compared to full human perceived color spectrum.


So as you can see from chart 2 the printer can't reproduce all the colors your monitor can display, on a side note a 6 color printer can extend that range some.

[mindspike]

It's not a perfect fix, and certainly no substitute for an expensive printer, but the graphic manipulator I use the most (GIMP) has a plugin to emulate the CMYK color space within the program. You can find more information about it, and whether or not you really need/want it at this link:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CM ... n_The_GIMP
It's a bit of effort and a learning curve, but if you want better match between your screen and printer, it's an inexpensive (and by that I mean free) option.

[ctaulbee]

Photoshop does that as well, but the "Core Point" remains your monitor can still only display RGB color info, no matter what program you use, so even if your source file is CMYK, it still has to be translated for you to see it on your monitor, and that the "translation" is where the issues come from, not software, not source files.

[ban32]

I agree with the above post that this is very informative. This is something that happens a lot and you explained it perfectly and in a simple way. Thanks.

[OLDCell]

You learn something new everyday, this I did not know but for the prints I have done they have generally been very good and not a noticeable difference.

Thank you for the information!1

[kane4lsu]

On my printer, every time I print the label it comes out great, but when I print the cover it looks terrible and it is like the quality is just plain bad.