Questions about printers and proof accuracy
Questions about printers and proof accuracy
- Subject: Questions about printers and proof accuracy
- From: Chris Cooper <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 08:58:00 -0800
My company owns one HP 8550 color laser jet and one Tektronix Phaser 780
color laser printer. I have used Colorblind Matchbox plus version 4 to
create printer profiles for each of the printers. I have also used the
Spectrocam Pro software that came with the Spectrocam to create a
monitor profile. The monitor is set for 5000K. I have been using the
CMYK TIFF Ole No Moire that came with Adobe Photoshop to test my
profiles. I use Adobe Photoshop 6.01 and have set my color settings to
use a colorsync workflow with RGB using the monitor profile created by
the spectrocam and the CMYK profile is set to use the profile created
with colorblind. With the understanding that I won't get an exact match
between what is on screen and what is printed I have gotten acceptably
close to WYSIWYG.
The Ole No Moire photo has four columns for CMYK which run from a 10%
patch all the way up to a solid 100% patch for each color. On both
printers I have noticed that the Cyan and Magenta values are much darker
than the process Cyan and Magenta swatches on the Pantone color swatch
book. I'm not printing on coated paper but the color is still not even
close to what I think I should be getting. The artists in my office
don't think the Cyan or Magenta are what they should be either. I can
also print out the configuration page for both printers and see what the
default CMYK swatches print out as and the result is very close to the
Ole No Moire CMYK 100% patches. They still print out darker than CMYK
pantone swatches. Obviously I'm new at this so perhaps I'm making some
glaring newbie mistake here. Should the default CMYK values on a color
laser printer look somewhat close to the Pantone patches or is this
something to be expected? As I said earlier, I can get the printers to
match what is on the monitor fairly closely but it doesn't do much good
if the colors are going to be so far off when the final product finally
goes to the printer. Is it just not possible to use color laser printers
to get a ball park idea of what the final output should look like? Do I
need a printer such as the HP 10 or 20 PS to get decent results?
On a different topic, I have been lurking on this mailing list for quite
a while now and have tried to find every colorsync related web page I
could to learn more about this subject. I have been surprised at how few
useful web resources exist to help users get the most from colorsync.
The best site I have found was inkjetmall.com. They had some nice step
by step tutorials on how to set up photoshop for inkjet printers and a
good introduction to color management but I'm still have tons of
questions about getting better results. Are there any other resources
you could recommend to help me figure out color management?