Printed colors look bad (offset print)
The book that I worked on for a long time just came out of the printshop (offset print). The grayscale content looks great, the book cover is not bad, too (albeit the color is not 100% the same as on the screen, but it's still nice). But the inner color content is not good. This is a huge dissapointment for me and a waste of money, too.
I'm not being fussy, I'm not a "drama king", I'm not the kind of person who would analyze every dot under a magnifying glass. And I'm aware that you can't get exactly the same colors on screen and in offset print. But this is not good.
The color is dull or washed out or lifeless, it's lacks the warmth and shineness it had on the screen. The light green turned dark green, the basic red turned darker red, the yellow became pale yellow etc...
Some people tell me that the problem might be in the paper (ordinary 80-gram paper was used in this case), but I find this explanation unconvincing. I printed test pages on ordinary paper on laser color printer and ink jet printer and in both cases the results looked GORGEUS.
I printed the test-pages at a small photocopier (xerox) shop just across the street for like 50 cents, so how come this tiny shop can give me fantastic results, while a professional printshop is not able to do that? I know that offset printing is a different thing, but still. Why it is so complicated, unpredictable and unreliable?
I tried to make photos of the prints so you can see them, but for some reason, the smartohone cannot properly catch all the details and all the differences.
The worst of all is that I'm not an expert and I don't know whom to blame now. Maybe it's no one's blame, maybe it's just a limitation of offset printing, but something is fishy here.
The damage is done and I can't do nothing about it now. I'm just thinking why this happened. I have some theories, but they might be wrong.
I exported the inner color content from Indesign with that misleading "Include All Tagged Source Profiles" setting, which, ironically, did not include any profiles. Basically, Indesign made decisions for me without my approval. This converted the color images to DeviceCMYK, so the printshop was supposed to put this undefined "beer" into the right "bottle", so it can show it's "true colors" (metaphorically speaking).
In the email that I sent together with the PDF, I told the printer which color space these images were created in (it was Euroscale Coated), but did the printer read that carefully, who knows. Since the images didn't have ICC profiles, maybe this confused the printer. God knows what colors they saw when they opened the file in their Adobe Acrobat. I have no clue what they were doing there, maybe they were converting from one thing to another, maybe not. It's chaos.
Please note that I sent the book cover with all profiles included and maybe that's why it turned out better than the inner color content. But this is just my assumption. Maybe the presence of ICC profiles or the lack thereof did not play such an important role in all this.
But anyway, I think that one should always include the ICC profiles (unless this creates some kind of problem), because that way you will know that you did everything properly, i.e. you sent to the printer a well-defined content. If the printer messes smth up, at least you'll know that it's not your fault, so you won't blame yourself for it.
I got some really useful advices on this forum, I thank everyone, esp. forum member @rob day , who seems to be one of the most informed (if not the most informed) in these matters. But unfortunately, I learned some things too late, and, unfortunately, those advices are for an ideal world, where both the designer and the printer know exactly what they are doing; where they have a perfect communication and coordination; where you have a good budget and the printer is (financially) motivated and patient enough to listen to you and to assist you; where the machines are ideally profiled/calibrated; where you have plenty of time and no deadlines; etc... etc...
Also, some designers can personally access the printshops and are allowed to oversee the process and to give suggestions like: "Make this darker/ lighter for me or warmer/colder for me" or smth like that... But not all of us have such opportunities. I cannot go there and boss them around.
In the real world, this is like a lottery, you send one thing and you just pray it turns out right, but in the end you get something completely different. I'm not competent to judge about all these things, but as an ordinary person I would like to say that this experience was an absolute nightmare. This offset tehnology is complicated, probably outdated and most importantly, unreliable. It seems to me that it didn't advance much from Gutenberg's press.
At some point, I had a crazy idea to spend the money not on offset printing, but on some more advanced laser color printer or a similar device (a more "sturdy" one) with which I could do everything by myself. But is there such a model that can handle large number of pages without breaking up and then how would I cut the pages and bind them together etc. Another problem is that, AFAIK, the laser printers cannot print litteraly from end to end, i.e. they add some margins of their own.
I even have a crazier idea: to somehow cut out the bad pages and to replace them with pages printed at that tiny photocopier shop.
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