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COLOUR MATCHING BETWEEN MONITOR AND PRINTER
We are currently using a Viewsonic VA2012w in conjunction with a Roland SP300 Versa Camm however the colour shown on screen is sometimes different to the printed colour.
How do I match the colours? (is there a simple way of doing it, ive seen some pretty daunting equations?)
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6 Replies
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well i just googled your monitor and i could only find one review by pcpro and they didn’t give it a good review.
without knowing your workflow, cant really comment but i do know that a good monitor which has a wide gamut will be able to display a good range of colour.
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You need to calibrate your monitor. You can do that "by eye" or get a Monitor Calibrator.
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These guys are probably the most renowned for their calibration tools. Make sure if you do decide to get one, that it’s specifically for an LCD screen.
Also if you’re using a Mac, to turn ColorSync (ColorSync is an Apple only software tool though).
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your rip software should overide what you see on the screen, unless your profiles are also way out it sounds like your monitor isnt doing your set up justice.
i always find 100 magenta 100 yellow (warm red) and 100 cyan 100 magenta 30 black (reflex) to be a quick indicator of our your printer is printing.
how are you preparing your files are you using a pdf workflow or running straight out of corel or illustrator?
if you are sending pdf,s direct you can go into the advanced print set up and change to print as file (this takes all the colour out of the single file preview, jpeg or zip encoding and doesnt look at all the built up layers this usually sorts 9 out of 10 colour problems)also are you using genuine inks and good vinyl if so you should be able to get a profile disc form your vinyl supplier.
colour monitor matching should only really apply to virtual printer set ups and not really effect postscript devices such as yours, not sure what your rip is but it should be 100% spot on. maybe your monitors ready for the bin!
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Yeah, I agree with Simon James. You can only rely on your on screen so much. Especially when dealing with spot colors. We usually try match the CMYK on the printer to a paint sample or from a pms book if possible. It can take a while messing around with the CMYK values and constantly printing after changing, but it will give you much better quality overall when you go to final output. I should note that we’re using a Creo RIP though. This allows us to set CMYK on the RIP and not from our computer. I can fill every color in FreeHand MX with 100% black and as long as the color is named correctly and is specified as a spot color, it will print out with all the correct colors. You also have to be mindful though if you use a lot of the same colors over a long period of time (we have our own standard color chart) that replacing ink and then recalibrating can throw the colors off a little bit (although not calibrating at all after putting new color cartridges in can be even worse).
If you want some good color palettes, you can check Kuler out on the Adobe website. http://kuler.adobe.com/
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hm… i must add if you design well with pantone colours or use colours that are known to print well and you know the rip is setup well, then I point towards cheap monitor
loads of tools to calibrate a monitor but i have a load of apple monitors plugged into PC’s and I don’t need to calibrate, its near enough. However a price of a monitor calibrator might be silly compared to a rated monitor
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