How to Design & Print Neon Green/Blue etc...

Fluorescent colours can be printed commercially by adding special ink channels on the press. 

With an inkjet printer, you are limited by the gamut of ink on paper.

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer:: co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management

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@jayl5949062 wrote:

Is there any way to design and print with NEON green (like 39FF14) or bright blue (like 0000FF)…it seems "impossible" to print in these cool colors? Is this true or is there some workaround?…Theoretically I cont see why these color catridges cannot make some color…

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One reason the cartridges can’t make some colors is that cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks simply can’t be as saturated as an RGB pixel. Another reason is that all inks have some impurities which prevent them from achieving their best theoretical saturations. A third reason is that print media is reflective, so it’s naturally limited to the light hitting it. If the light is not bright or not pure white, there is no way the ink can match a highly saturated RGB value coming off of a screen with an intense light source of its own (emitted, not merely reflected). Paper is not a light source like a computer display, so paper can never match a screen in brightness.

Below is an illustration of the problem. The solid volume in the middle is a 3D representation of the color gamut of Canon Pixma printer inks on Red River Arctic Polar Gloss paper. (Because the exact color gamut depends on the specific combination of inks and paper used, and pro glossy photo papers tend to have a wider color gamut.)

The dots represent the two RGB colors you specified: 39FF14 and 0000FF (assuming sRGB, because the exact color those values produce depends on the RGB color space). I’m guessing the lighter dots might be aliasing in the image where I drew the colors. You can clearly see that the dots are well outside the volume. That means those colors are too far outside the color range that the printer’s inks can reproduce on that high quality paper. It cannot be done.

If this was going to be printed on a commercial printing press (the kind that can cost $1 million), the printing company might offer you the option to add more process color inks to extend the color range, or add two custom-mixed spot color inks (for example, Pantone inks) that are a closer match to your two colors…all at additional cost, of course. But those options are not available on the kinds of inkjet printers we can carry home for under $250. Even if you spent ten times that much money on a pro inkjet printer with extended gamut inks, it would still not be able to reproduce those colors. Print designers are also aware that CMYK is particularly weak in reproducing highly saturated blues.

The color limitations of different media are so immovable that being able to work within those limitations and find color palettes that hold up across TV/video displays, papers, packaging, signage, etc. is a valuable skill for a designer. So is studying and understanding principles of color theory and human color perception; for example, to make a color appear more saturated, one option is to surround it with a complementary color to make the viewer’s eye perceive that color as more saturated than the inks can actually achieve.

There's no "trick". It's all down to what those particular inks can reproduce on that particular paper. That's the limit. That's the printer's color gamut.

Don't convert to CMYK for inkjet printers. CMYK is strictly for commercial offset presses. Inkjet printers are RGB devices that expect RGB data. If you send it CMYK data, it will be converted back to RGB first, and then an internal conversion in the printer driver to whatever inks are used.

If this printer comes with its own icc profiles for different papers, this is easy to preview. Just soft proof to the profile and you see directly on screen the color you get. That's the gamut limit.

The key to all this is color management and icc profiles. That's where all this is put into a systematic and predictable framework. Any color space can be described in an icc profile, which also defines the gamut boundaries for that color space.

That's not just the printer's color space, but also the document color space. Your example green 39FF14 is not the same color in sRGB and Adobe RGB, for instance. But you may not see the difference on screen, because Adobe RGB 39FF14 is probably outside your monitor's gamut. Same principle, gamut boundary, can't be reproduced.

And finally, hex numbers are not absolute numbers. They don't define a color until you also define the color space. It's just base 16 notation for ordinary RGB numbers. Numbers are always specific to color space. The same visual color will yield different numbers in different color spaces.

No, it's not easy to fix.

I found a description of this printer model and it appears to be an RGB device, even though it uses CMYK cartridges. This means that the printer driver is responsible for color separation and decides how much ink should be applied to each cartridge to print the desired color.

You can influence this process only by using the settings provided in the printer's control panel. 

With the help of specialists or on your own, you can try to build a printer profile. In most cases this will have a positive effect on the quality of color reproduction. However, even in this case, you will not be able to accurately print colors that fall outside the gamut of your device.