why can i not get a colour match with troop please?

[Rodney Gold]

You cant rely on your monitor unless you colour workflow
DL the color chip cart from the roland site under suppoert
http://www.rolanddga.com
and got to pantone.com and DL the pantone chart (eps in support) , print em and colour match to them or calibratre your monitor according to them. Or change the RIP to colorip and use that. It has a very good screen preview in the rip that almost matches what you are getting and a zillion controls to change the image.

[J. Hulme]

Hi Rodney, thanks.

We never actually got colorip with the machine, just troop.
So I will have to match to customer supplied samples and not manually input values? Or are you saying match the coloured image on the screen which seems to be correct to the printed pantone .eps we have already printed on our vinyl?

I was going to print the full CMYK pallete and match to that but it is 3 metres long. I’ll give the pantone ones a go and print and match to the colour I see on the screen after we have entered the individual CMYK values, as I say they match the customer supplied sample near enough on screen, but just not when printed.

[Rodney Gold]

Dont rely on your screen to match , its a RGB device and the printer is a CMYK , cmyk cannot do all RGB colours and there is a massive translation involved. Even if you simulate CMYK on your screen , it still is very problematic.
Print your colour charts and take those as gospel. IE if you need to match , match using that
So if you see brick red on your screen and it prints pink on your media , then if you want pink , input the “brick red” value for screen display. Ideally , you really need to calibrate your screen better so you have a What you see is what you get scenario.
Colour stuff is incredibly complex and the biggest problem is the variability of output devices , for example you mentioned you had a deskjets output to match to – but who’s to say that that devices rendering of a particular colour is correct?
The printer only prints 7 colours , it can however represent millions by variable dot spacing and overlaps , dot placement etc. Thats what the RIP does , it tells the machines which dots to fire and how to fire them to translate.
Problem is , what works today might no work tommorrow. For example lets say you colour match on a vinyl that holds ink well , IE when the dot of ink hits , its stays where it is and the solvent flashes off , tommorow you use a media that doesnt hold the ink quite as well and the dot splashes down and spreads etc … no way will the former vinyls colours match this other vinyl. So essentailly , if you want colour matching to the nth degree , you either have to spend a lot on a colour matched linearized system and make your own profiles or print a known reference on each media using each profile or resolution (changes in resolution change colours too)
However , luckily , most customers are prepared to accept slight variances and the most popular request we get is to produce a graphic with more POP than accuracy.

[Cookster]

Hi,

Have you tried changing your rendering intent? In rip and print go to advanced, then click the colour settings button & then click rendering intent tab.
Depending on what type of file you are trying to print, vector, bitmap, text or gradient? Click the drop down box and you have different rendering intent options.

Do a small test print using all the different options, the colours vary greatly. I reccomend you try, relative or absolute colorimetric as these seem to print closer to pantone colours. Also you have an option to choose pure hues, this allows you to get a pure colour for really good spot colours.

It takes time to find which settings are best for different jobs but i can usually get them pretty spot on with a bit of playing around with these options.

Joe