VersaCamm printing – cmyk rgb?

[David Rowland]

Thats correct. A printer with CMYK has less colour range then a Monitor with RGB. Output’s can look flat if artwork is not drawn correctly.
If you have photoshop.. open your print file and look at it in RGB and then CMYK or try a conversion in photoshop.

[Alan Drury]

Dave is right, if you don’t have Photoshop Corel Draw and Corel PhotoPaint can do the same just ensure the colour manager in Corel is set correctly.
Alan

[Mark Candlin]

Allways try and send files rgb to the rip.The rip does a much better job of converting the image to cmyk.

[RobGF]

I don’t have a versacam…

But I would agree that RGB is a larger colour space than CMYK. But at that point that’s about all I would agree with.

If you look at solvent printers using CMYK or CcMmYK you won’t get an impressive colour gamut. In fact, the gamut of colours available with solvents is hardly impressive at all when compared with other analogue or digital methods of reproduction. With that said, you can’t run around expecting RGB images to be the best for printing because it supports a wider range of colour. The CMYK workspace of Photoshop has a wider gamut of colour than your solvent printer. So what I am saying here is that it really doesn’t matter if you start with RGB or CMYK because each of these colour spaces is quite a bit bigger than your solvent in CMYK. No matter what, colours get clipped, flattened, whatever.

Imagine that RGB is a bucket that holds 2L, Photoshop’s properly setup CMYK space holds 1.5L but your solvent CMYK is only 1L… You won’t be able to pour all of the contents from RGB or a good photoshop CMYK workspace into the smaller 1L container. I know that’s over simplifing.

If RGB images work a LOTS better than CMYK images in your setup, that’s fine but it probably means that your colour management is improperly setup, the profiles with the RIP are horrible, or something has been setup incorrectly.

So, I’d agree that RGB is a bigger and therefore superior colour space to CMYK but in the real world of things being properly setup for digital printing with solvents it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

If RGB works for some people that’s cool especially if it makes you happy. I simply want to point out that if things are setup properly it is possible to get very good results out of the CMYK space. Once people are used to their RIP’s and versacams, cadets, etc. etc. the next new toy that should be purchased is a spectrophotomtre so that you will be able to establish a really effective colour workflow.

Once you’re colour mangement is tight, there are advantages to working with CMYK as a colour space. It makes for easier colour understanding when your output is CMYK and your workspace for editing is CMYK. “Oh, that print will look better if I ad 5% Cyan at the midtones” vs “Oh, I need more Cyan at the midtones so that means I reduce what colour? Oh, that’s right, red.”

Don’t mean to sound like a snot here but there’s nothing wrong with the CMYK space for digital printing if you’re set up correctly and at the end of the day it’s probably easier to work with.

Rob

[drogers4]

I’ve had my versacamm for a few months now and as Mark said, I agree that the printer converts the colors to CMYK nicely. If working in photoshop, when you convert an image from RGB to CMYK you will see a huge difference in colors (they look dull) but if you send it to the printer in RGB it seems brighter than sending in CMYK. I typically do most of my design work in Flexisign, but when I’m working with bitmaps I use photoshop and never convert it to CMYK and have been pleased with the results. Good Luck!

Doyle

[Stephen Morriss]

Works the same on my Cadet.

I send bitmaps as RGB as the colours come out better.
But I send vector as CMYK as they come out better.

Everything looks on the screen as it prints so my screen is close.
I have ticked the box in the eps export for bitmaps to be converted to RGB and that works ok for me.

Some clever person will be able to tell us what’s going on but it’s beyond me at the moment and at the end of the day if it works then I’m leaving it… for now anyway

[mark walker]

H all, on this subject, just trying to print some labels at the moment but can’t get the blue to match a sample of vinyl. Will get there in the end but has anyone any tips for doing this with a corel file and using the my eyes and not some fancy spectro – wassit thingy mackall it? 😮

Cheers, mark.

[Rodney Gold]

Download a chip chart from roland (www.rolanddga.com – under support) or the pantone eps from http://www.pantone.com , print it out using the profile you are using now and change the colour of the blue to visuallly match the colour you want it to be.