Printed marketing material such as banners, billboards, business cards and letterheads form a very important part of the image of a company. Don’t be surprised if the colours on the printed material is slightly different from what you saw on your computer monitor. Here’s why…
Let’s take the process of designing and printing a company logo. A graphic designer designs his artwork by viewing the project on his computer monitor. He will play around with colors, shapes, textures and fonts and produce logo concepts. He emails the logo to the client to view and give comments on. Time, cost and distance might require emailing of artwork. The client loves the logo and emails him back to say that this version is now signed off as the accepted version. The designer chose a specific blue because it represents the open skies. The client viewed the logo on his monitor and loves the blue too.
The day arrives and the logo has been printed on a business card. The client looks at it and says, “Hey! This is not the right blue! The blue I signed off was darker!”. It seems that heads will soon roll. Someone is to blame. Is it the designer that accidentally changed the logo to another blue before sending it to print or did the printer company alter the design and ended up with a different blue? Perhaps all of the above. Perhaps none of the above.
Here is a list of reasons why colours on electronic designs might differ from printed designs:
- Monitors work in the RGB (Red,Green,Blue) colour space while printers use the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) colour space.
Designs look fine on a monitor if they are designed in RGB to begin with. Converting them to CMYK might make them look odd on screen, but they will print correctly, to a certain measure. It is difficult to sign of an image file that is currently in CMYK mode while viewing with an RGB monitor. - Monitor settings differ.
The designer was sitting in a darkish room when choosing the blue and his blue looks vibrant. The client was viewing the same design in a well-lit room, making the blue seem lighter. The designer uses an LCD display and the client uses a CRT monitor and the vibrancy differs. The contrast and saturation settings on each monitor might differ as well, rendering the blue with different values. - Each printer in the world prints colour slightly different.
Sometimes it is really obvious and sometimes it is almost impossible to see the difference. Normal desktop printers are definitely not something to do colour proofing with. If you print the design out on your desktop printer then a slight shortage on any of the colours will make the colour come out wrong. There are a lot of factors that can influence even the most expensive printing equipment. These include altitude, humidity, the current heat of the printer, age of the printer, quality of ink, the paper that is being used, special coatings on the paper etc. Even viewing the same printed material in different lighting conditions may make the colour seem different.
Tips on getting the most accurate colour
Go to your nearest printer company and ask to see their Pantone colour matching system. Each coloru in the Pantone chart has a matching number. Most design applications have the same Pantone charts built in so that colour matching is easy. Read up on Pantone at Wikipedia. Make sure that the file is converted to CMYK (If not designed in it originally) before sending it to print. Some printer companies might ask for colour separation prints which the leading design packages can produce. It is also important for the designer to choose the correct colour management profile in the design package.
All in all, it is possible to get near perfect colour matching, but signing off a piece of artwork on screen leaves one open to colour discrepancies later.