Participant

Question

RGB Printing??

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
September 1, 2012
13 replies
90783 views

Hello,

I am designing a business card that has lime green as a main color, and I am finding it impossible to find a commercial printer that will print in RGB! I completely understand the difference between the 2 color pallets I just don't understand why I can not find one printer that will print RGB! So does that mean any business card I ever do can never have bright colors?? Cause that just seems a little silly, I must be doing something wrong here???

Can anyone help please!

Thanks!!

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C

cecilrothfeld

Participant

The main problem why you can't print your lime color is due to the fact that inks are not perfect. In theory, you can produce any color with the correct mixing of inks, if the inks are ideal representations of three colors, separated equally on the color wheel and on its border.

In practice, this kind of inks does not exist, and thats the reason why you can't obtain a lot of colors, lime between them. The best you can try is look for a digital printer who uses 6 or 8 inks (a technique that helps increasing the amount and intensity of colors you can obtain in the printing process) and ask them to print for you a test of the colors they can achieve in the sorrounding of lime. May be you can get something near to the color you are looking for. By the way, ask them to avoid using a profile for their printer that will match the print to any standard (like Fogra or similar). Ask them for their best color, best or bigger gamut.

Hope this is useful for you.

station_two

Inspiring

Mylenium is right.

You should really take advantage of Photoshop's Soft Proofing abilities to see exactly what your card will look like after printing on a CMYK printer —even on an inkjet printer which expects an RGB image file that its driver converts to its own flavor of CMYK or CcMmYK.

By using the printer's target profile for the specific combination of ink/paper/printer you can see on your monitor what your image will look like in print.

In Photoshop:

View menu > Proof Setup… > Custom > specific printer profile

Then you can toggle the soft proof view at will (Command (Mac)/Control (Wind.) Y) and adjust your colors accordingly with both Proof Colors and Gamut Warning checked.

Ask your commercial printer for their specific CMYK printer profile.

D

DLW1706Author

Participant

Thank you again,

the problem i am having is making lime green, i even tried using cmyk color

codes to get it close and it still fades to an dull green, there's got to

be something im doing wrong?

G

gator soup

Inspiring

>> something im doing wrong?

as others have explained, you are creating out-of-gamut colors in your RGB mode, here's the PROOF:

somewhere in the above Granger Chart is your green

here is the Photoshop "soft proof" in CMYK mode:

as you can see the CMYK space does not contain your green

the smaller CMYK print Space (paper and ink technology) simply is not physically capable of reproducing the pretty colorful saturation, gamut and dynamic range of the source or monitor RGB Spaces used in the RGB rainbow of color spectrum example

your printer probably wants to run your green as a "spot color" to make you not disappointed in your creation

professional and amateur printers alike should make themselves intimately familiar with Photoshop's Soft Proofing and Gamut Warning tools and train their eyes to work within more real-world color gamuts and dynamic ranges for print work

Mylenium

Legend

I completely understand the difference between the 2 color pallets

Apparently not. No print process on this planet is based on RGB. No matter what you think, they are all based on popping ink on a substrate as a multiplicative/ subtractive process. It's always translated one way or another, either explicitly with color modes and color proviles or automatically by whatever printer driver. You're looking for something that doesn't exist. However, most printers will happily print RGB-based files, if they are color managed and have a suitable profile assigned that allows them to properly translate colors to what their devices support...

Mylenium

D

DLW1706Author

Participant

Thank you,

I did ask my printer about lime green and all they said was that if i sent

an rgb file it will be converted to cmyk, now every time i do that (through

photoshop) obviously it is making it a dull green, no where even close to

lime green. He did tell me if i paid and extra 50 buck they could stop all

mass printing to get a color close to what i was looking for. Does that

sound right? idk just seems a little pricey to get lime green especially

when the cards only cost 25. I'm getting a frustrated with this stupid

bright color thing just doesn't make sense!! is there a setting i can

change in my color profiles that will help? or something else i can do??

Thanks again for your help it is greatly appreciated!!!

Mylenium

Legend

You seriously need to read up on the different color models, color management and the different gamut (=ability to render colors) of those colro models. Your printer is right - your lime green is "out of gamut" when doing an automated conversion and its CMYK mixture formula needs to be adjusted. Whether he does it or you is secondary, but a good lime green in CMYK is pretty much just yellow with a hint of cyan and easily created in PS eitehr by rebuilding the document natively in CMYK in PS or cleaning up the channels and adjusting them after a conversion. Your automatic conversion simply adds a lot of black and magenta becaue - tada - you're working without color management and nothing really makes sense to the color engine. Anyway, you realyl need to read up on that stuff or you'll be forever lost.

Mylenium

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