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Trouble hitting a decent neutral printed grey?
Afternoon!
The company I work for has had issues hitting a neutral grey when printing… It always seems to be either slightly green or slightly pink in tone 🙁 . I’ve only been in the sign industry 3 and a bit years so I’d consider myself a bit of a newcomer… So I’m wondering if someone with a bit more experience could shed some light on whether this is a known issue with an easy workaround or not?
We run HP Latex Printers and mostly print onto IJ40/IJ180/MD5 with their respective laminates. We also calibrate the printers regularly! In fact, we have a lot of ‘damage repair’ work come through which we have no problem matching colours on! But if you ask us to print a large block of a neutral grey fading to black and we’ll get a bit twitchy.
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6 Replies
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It’s because RIP’s try to produce grays from 4 colours by default. See if the RIP has an option for Mono Print or similar, or maybe even try switch off the colour management altogether. Although this might cause a latex to over ink (it does on ours anyway).
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quote Stafford Cox:It’s because RIP’s try to produce grays from 4 colours by default. See if the RIP has an option for Mono Print or similar, or maybe even try switch off the colour management altogether. Although this might cause a latex to over ink (it does on ours anyway).What is colour management and how do you switch it off?
Is that something to do with "density Control Only" in Versaworks? -
We had the same issue with our vs-540 for some product labels. Spent hours messing with colour adjustments lowering the CMY values and raising the K. We found that starting with the max impact profile and editing to make all settings absolute, I think it was made a true grey, a dark grey but a true grey, no sign of any tints of other colours on the grey and still managed to keep the other colours on the label popping.
As I say it was very tedious, I guess this is where having a white ink in the configuration would have helped a lot. Ours is
C M Y K C M Lc Lm -
Hi guys,
Density Control Only does turn off the Color Management, so can work in some instances. It depends on the format of the grey as well though…is it bitmap or vector? RGB or CMYK swatches? Emedded profile for document? …etc.
The Color Management settings will interpret/amend colour in different ways depending on these variables.
The Lk (light Black) ink helps a lot. Another trick could be to make a greyscale (for bitmap) and then add the Roland Spot Colour for K only (RVW-BK21A).
When you dig a bit deeper there’s a lot to Color Management, within the RIP and in the design software. -
quote Joe Wigzell:Hi guys,Density Control Only does turn off the Color Management, so can work in some instances. It depends on the format of the grey as well though…is it bitmap or vector? RGB or CMYK swatches? Emedded profile for document? …etc.
The Color Management settings will interpret/amend colour in different ways depending on these variables.
The Lk (light Black) ink helps a lot. Another trick could be to make a greyscale (for bitmap) and then add the Roland Spot Colour for K only (RVW-BK21A).
When you dig a bit deeper there’s a lot to Color Management, within the RIP and in the design software.To date I’ve not noticed a pattern to the problem so I’m not sure if the format of the file is having an effect or not.
Do you know of any good reputable sources I can use to educate myself further in colour management?
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We run courses at Roland but with regards to colour they would be aimed at Roland kit/RIP on the whole (you have latex right?). There’s a good book, think it’s called ‘real world color management’, it’s a bit hard-going and with a lot that isn’t directly relevant…but will help get the fundamentals. Antalis do a course on CM too at their digital academy.
(hope this is ok with Forum rules!?)
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