Can anyone out there help us with colour matching?

[Kevin Hills – B&P]

Colour matching is far from being an exact science, you can increase your know how by downloaidng colour guides and learning more about Colour Management and Profiling.

However a failsafe colour matching toolkit that gives you a physical representation of the colours you can print onto your substrate of choice consists of…

1. A colour swatch chart that you print as a point of reference

2. A Pantone guide that you can use to compare clients requested colour with your chart (often you will find that the colour asked for is a closer match to another colour on the chart you print).

So what do you do? Well if you print mostly for example on Oracal vinyl, and commonly use perhaps 720×720 and 720×360 on your printer, then print the colour chart onto your Oracal media at both of these resolutions. You can then file these printed charts away for use as a point of reference when you are asked to match a particular colour.

This assumes you have suitable profiles on your system to print with correct ink levels on your desired media.

Here are some bits and pieces that you can download that may be of use:

http://www.bplightbrigade.com/Uniform_PANTONE_Chart.zip ZIP file containing PANTONE chart in both CorelDRAW and EPS formats. (May need WinZip to extract files).

http://www.bplightbrigade.com/bpgs/colourguide.pdf A basic colour guide and glossary covering the terminology used in colour management (48 pages)

http://www.bplightbrigade.com/bpgs/colourmanagement.pdf A guide to colour management (52 pages)

The easiest way to download the 2 colour guides (in Acrobat PDF format) is to right click on link and select Save Target As… this will allow you to save the file to your desktop from where you can open it in Acrobat, read it, or print it for future reference.

Hope this helps, it is not a specific solution to your Signlab problems, but is a general workaround that will allow anyone printing colour to at least select their colours from a constant point of reference.

Even with all of our in-house expertise, colour management tools, profiling software and other colour gadgets, this is still the method we use to create failsafe colour reference guides. Note that if you accidentally change the colour profile, the colours will be different, so it is therefore vital that the settings, profile and resolution at which you print your charts remain identical when you run actual jobs.

Naturally you can print charts for all of the media you commonly use, this is again highly recommended.

Following this procedure should give you the confidence to know excatly what you can achieve with your printer.

Good luck and happy colour matching.

Kevin

[Phill Fenton]

I use corel draw to produce my final artwork prior to printing. Corel has pantone and various other palletes. Simply export as .eps files then open it up using your RIP software. I’m assuming your using signlab to drive the printer as well? Have you tried using the Roland rip instead (Versaworks?).

I have a Cadet and use the RIP supplied (Troop V5). This produces good colour matches to the pantone shades in Corel.

I suspect Signlab may be easier to use (just print straight from Signlab – no need to export then open up in your RIP software). But if it’s not producing the right colours maybe you would be better to use a seperate RIP to handle your files.

I used to drive my Colorcam direct from Signlab and had problems with colours (particularly Blues) so maybe yours is a similar problem, in which case try designing (or at least introduce your final colours) using Corel and RIP using the Roland RIP. 😀

[mark jones]

you can..

but its limited.

all roland machines come with windows drivers and the sp540 is no differant.

the windows driver has a lot of the functionality of the rip software built in but it is limited to the genuine versaworks profiles.

if you want any more detailed info the please ask.

[Tim Hobbs]

First of all thanks guys.

Kevin, I will have a good look at the options that you have given me.
One thing that is baffling me though is that we have printed all of the
colour swatches in the Signlab program as we quickly realized that the printer does not match a Pantone colour with it’s swatch in the Pantone book.

The problem that we seem to have is that we have asked the customer to chose a colour that is closest to what he requires. Then when we change the text in his artwork to the corresponding colour and print, the Roland
seems to change the colour to something that does not even represent what it printed on the colour swatch originally, not minutes before.

What’s more, we can take a block of primary colour say say red, change it’s CMYK values, say increase the amount of cyan so that it becomes purple, save, reopen the file then when we print the purple square it prints……………red!

Baffled!!!

Phill,

They didn’t give us the original Rip for the printer, just sold us Signlab.

Mark,

Yes please, can I get the genuine Versaworks profiles easily?

Once again guys

Thanks a lot, I will get to the bottom of it in the end.

Tim
:lol1: :lol1: :lol1: :lol1:

[mark jones]

hi tim if you send me your details i will get a copy of versaworks and the windows driver to you.

who was your supplier?

[mark jones]

some of your issues may be down to how signlab is colourcorrecting your input files for output.

now i am not a signlab user, but ill try and explain this in another way.

take versaworks for example..

you want to print a safety sign, black and yellow onto white.

choose the correct media profile, and then we have an option of how we want to colour manage the output.

versaworks has many differant colour management settings.
the 2 main ones i use regullary are…

1) pre press europe fro photographic/bitmap images
2) sign and display for vector based fills.

if i print the above safety sign with a pre press cms, the yellow gets colour corrected and actually prints from the printer with a slight cyan tint which tones down the yellow directly from the machine.

if i use a sign and display cms it does no colour matching, so i get the natural direct bright yellow that i need for the safety sign.

i am sure that signlab has similar setting aswell, and i will look into that.

if you contact me i may be able to talk you through a few thingd that i do with colour swatches to aid colour matching.

pm me for contact details.