Colour calibration between iMac and Canon Pro-1000

[EnglishCyclist]

Hi all,

I recently purchased a Canon Pro-1000 to print posters for my sidegig business [link removed by moderator] I have previously had another company do my printing and drop ship the prints but I want to get a bit more control to the whole service (nicer packaging, custom prints etc.).

So to cut a long story short. The Pro-1000 is ace. I've just about finished off my first set of inks (pleasantly suprised with how many posters I've done with it) but I have recently stumbled onto a colour issue. 

One poster I sell is a light red [Link removed by moderator] and each time I print this colour its coming out orange. The background colour is C0 M75 Y60 K0)

I've tried a colour calibration via the printer which didn't do anything that I could see to the results. And I've now spent a few hours printing out various swatches of red/pink combos and final found one that prints similar to how it looks on screen. However it's bright pink when on screen. (C0 M90 Y30 0k).

It won't render well at all but this is the colour I am using vs the screen colour...

I have the a generic ICC profile for the paper (provided by the paper manufacturer Fototspeed) and its installed / being used by the printer.

Current print settings (at a top level)

Working space is CMYK and using the same ICC profile

So I am wondering if I need to invest more time in calibrating my screen... I am currently using the built in calibration. 

Screen calibration

Any thoughts on things to try out? Happy to invest in a colour calibration tool if thats the best shout!

And yes I searched the forum but to be honest, being a bit of a print noob, I am unsure exactly the problem I am searching 🙂

Cheers,

Rob

[D Fosse]

First of all, why do you have rendering intent "saturation"? That won't work. Use relative colorimetric, which remaps white point and hard clips anything out of gamut. Perceptual gives softer clipping by remapping and shifting colors near the gamut boundary. None of those should give general color shifts, but saturation and absolute colorimetric will.

Don't work in CMYK! CMYK is strictly for offset printing. An inkjet printer works with RGB data and CMYK just means an extra conversion - not only unnecessary, but also needlessly restricting the color gamut and black level.

Monitor calibration and profiling is a must. Get an i1 Display Pro, it's the best deal on the market.

As for printer settings, make sure you have the right media type in the printer driver as well as in the Photoshop print dialog. Also make sure color management is turned off in the printer driver.

[EnglishCyclist]

Great thanks D_Fosse... I am a digital designer by trade so all this is new to me 🙂 I'll give those settings a go.

The reason for the Saturation setting was on some initial tests I wanted to achieve a more punchy colour (to match some litho prints I had done) and Saturation seemd to offer this over the othe options. Perhap changing to RGB and using Relative Colorimetric will be good too. I will try out shortly.

I'll have a look for a i1 Display Pro too.

Much apprecited!

Rob

[D Fosse]

<disregard>

[D Fosse]

The thing about Saturation intent is that it will try to maintain saturation level regardless of how much the actual hue has to be shifted to achieve that. In some cases it can be a lot, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's the main explanation for what you're seeing. Relative Colorimetric is the safest intent and where you normally start.

You need to work in RGB. Your printer is an RGB device that expects RGB data. The print profile is an RGB profile. Conversion to actual inks (more than 4!) happens internally in the printer driver, under the covers.

Obviously, you need to see on screen what will come out of your printer, and this is where the calibrator comes in. If your monitor profile is accurate, and your printer profile is accurate, the two will agree.

But there is one more thing: An icc profile will just assume that white is white and black is black. It doesn't question the "quality" of white or black. An important part of matching screen to print is to match whites and blacks. Anything in between, the profiles will handle.

You can't change the color and brightness of paper; it is what it is. So you change the monitor instead. You make it display whites and blacks like your print. Set brightness and temperature in your monitor to show you "paper white" on screen. Just get a visual match, nevermind the numbers. It depends on ambient/print viewing light, so numbers will vary.

Do the same for black. Get a visual match to print black (maximum ink).

Once this is done, run your calibrator. Now the profiles will take care of all the rest, with great accuracy, within this framework of a white point and a black point.

Some people will say that you can't match screen to print, but it's not true. You can, and this is how you do it.

[NB, colourmanagement]

Hi Rob,

I'm an English Cyclist too! I like your work.

You've had some very good tips here, definitely work in RGB, CMYK is adding an unneeded and potentially damaging step to the process. Also Relative Colorimetric is a better rendering intent for colour fidelity. Occasionally with those designs you'll like the result of using the Saturation intent for sure, but RelCol is a better default.

Here is some reading on ICC profiles and how they work for you to provide accurate colour through the digital workflow I hope you might find it useful: https://www.colourmanagement.net/advice/about-icc-colour-profiles/

You also need to be sure both the display screen and the printer are accurately profiled.

I hope this helps

thanks
neil barstow, colourmanagement.net :: adobe forum volunteer
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[EnglishCyclist]

Great thanks Neil (and everyone for the help) - that link is great - I think in a couple of weeks I will be a colour profile expert (or not!)

My thought process (being a digital designer) is that using RGB would give me access (in Illustrator/Photoshop) to colours that wouldn't print. So I use CMYK. It shows how much I have to learn! 😄

My normal working process is to create my designs in Illustrator (CYMK) and save down an editable High Quality Print PDF. I would then send these to my printer and they would come back great. Since having the Pro-1000 I have taken to opening the PDFs in Photoshop (It seems to print much better the raster file than the vector for some reason - another thing to explore!). As previously explained I would open them in CYMK mode.

So going forward it sounds like I should I convert my PDFs to RGB and open them in photoshop as RGB. With a monitor calibration, and I suppose a custom print profile, I should be able to marry up the colour on screen to the print (as best as is possible).

I have an i1 Display Pro on order but in the mean time I tried opening and RGB PDF in RGB and printing that using the Relative Colorimetric setting and the generic paper profile select via the Print dialog.

I also tried printing others... and to be honest you would be hard pressed to tell the difference from the original. It's still coming out orange'y not light red/pink 😄

Out of interest could someone confirm the colour #eb675d / 235-103-93 / C1 M 71 Y58 K0 is something akin to a salmon colour (not a tangerine colour). I just pulled out an old Pantone swatch guide and my printer is putting out something akin to a slightly darker 1575 and what I am after is a 7416. I just want a Vuelta Red that is lighter/more vintage looking... Hah! 

I have an i1 Display Pro on order coming tomorrow. I'll be interested to see how that goes!

Cheers all

Rob

[D Fosse]

You have "printer manages color". You need "Photoshop manages color", and then pick the appropriate profile. Printer color management must be turned off, you don't want double profiling.

I briefly saw Coated FOGRA39 in a dialog up there, so presumably that's the CMYK profile in use here. With those numbers it looks like this. If you use a color managed web browser and your display is properly calibrated and profiled, this is an accurate representation:

With another profile it would be different. In any case CMYK is entirely moot. It has no place here.

Here's what happens if you put the numbers 184-90-52 (#b85a34) into three different files: one sRGB, another Adobe RGB, and the third ProPhoto:

So you can see that you really need to relate numbers to a specific color space. Otherwise they mean nothing.

[NB, colourmanagement]

Hi Rob

you wrote: "Out of interest could someone confirm the colour  235-103-93 / C1 M 71 Y58 K0 - - - "

unless the ICC colourspace is given - RGB and CMYK numbers are meaningless

I hope this helps

thanks
neil barstow, colourmanagement.net :: adobe forum volunteer
[please do not use the reply button on a message within the thread, only use the blue reply button at the top of the page, this maintains the original thread title and chronological order of posts]