RGB Printing??

The color of monitor is RGB color model, but the printing is CMYK color model.

So I suggest you can transfer the file of business card to CMYK, and then adjust the color of lime green, that will be meet the color you want.

Wow! What a crazy thread this one is.

If you actually have a printing company you can physically meet.

That's your golden ticket. Let them show you examples and color books.

If they will build a spot channel in your Photoshop file for $50. Great deal.

The rest of the thread... . yes, no, kind of...There is a mega-ton of options and information.

But I I dig color engineer pastel  grease guy sympathetic to CMYK.

Might as well throw RGB in as well and we will both ride magical unicorns into a rainbow.

Can I just say:

While this forum often gives some solid advice, this particular thread is exceptional.

I’ve learnt more about printing in this thread then my 2-week crash course some years back…

I’m forever thankful to everyone who has given their professional opinion and truly it’s changed me as a designer for the better!

Still booked marked

I agree with you that it's sad commercial printers these days can't print in RGB!  Oh that would be excellent wouldnt it!!!  As someone who has made his living as a Color Engineer in Commercial print, I can attest to the sad loos designers have to go through seeing their prized beautiful saturated bloes disintigrate into dull CMYK equivilants! 

The problem is that RGB colors are actually measured based on the light, dark, primaries of light in CIELab color.  So their not in a printable format yet.   Sadly printers still cannot print with light!  These neanderthals can only use pigmented grease and tree parts to get your job off press.  That's where the fun starts for them.  It's not easy to throw grease at a tree with any kind of accuracy let alone beauty.  So we have to give them some props at least! 

The problem is the pigments available on Earth today are not as bright as the light that shines on them.  So they only reflect back some of that light, and only what bounces off the tree underneath.  We can be plain and call it paper from hear on out but you get the drift.  The brighter the paper the brighter the color will look.  Cheap paper is not as bright and the colors are more muted.  It's a trade off. 

The real rub is in the conversion process, where designers have to sacrifice their childeren to the god's of CMYK just to get something halfway close to their beautiful art.  Sadly no solution for that today, unless you add more colors to that process, like high end ink jet printers do today.  So adding, Orange 021, and Pantone Green, and Reflex Blue can add brightness to your printed result at a cost of corse.  I have also made seperations with pastel colors that turned out gorgeous.  So your realy not held captve to the CMYK monster so long as you can pay the ransom for custom separations and print work to keep all the beauty in your RGB files. 

Hope that helped a bit!  So sorry for your loss!

This is an interesting one.. I have as a rule run all commercial print files as CMYK, but have recently printed through a large format printer (Not Lithographic)  where the are extra inks used (Green and Orange) as addition to the CMYK, Other printers may have light Cyan & Pink!  And keeping to my RGB profile have abetter brighter results.

But if your are printing lithographic then would advise you buy a colour bible that give multi colour CMYK breakdowns' and pick  near colour from this or chose a Pantone and  see a wet proof prior production.

Booked mark this page for the sheer CMYK / RGB knowledge being dropped!

Very interesting read guys, thank you all so much

Most digital printers use six or more ink colors and can reproduce most RGB tones.

Screen Printing?

All printers print in CYMK, the only way to get a specific vibrant color printed is using a spot or pantone color. I don't see that as a possibility for your project, unless you have a lot of money to spare. The other thing you can do to achieve that look, is look for a printer that prints clear ink, to give you that vibrant look. That's a whole other process that the print shop will guide you through. The best thing to do is design everything in CYMK color in your program of choice so you don't get any surprises when you print your cards.

To help you understand the difference between RGB and CYMK, RGB are colors mixed using light and CYMK using ink, trying to print RGB is like you attempting to print light.

You said the card was predominatly lime-green. What are the other colors?

If youu have  a lime grenn backround with black text and or black halftones,  the card could then be treated as a two-color job. The printer could use a Pantone lime green and black halftones.

There are plenty of small specialty print shops that would happy to help you with such two-color job.