How many times have you looked at a pdf on screen only to find that the printed version is a million miles away?
Hopefully these few simple tips will help you overcome some of the more common problems that are encountered. Lets start with a few basics:
The majority of hardware (computers, printers, faxes, cameras etc.) are manufactured in Aisa
For the moment lets call that : Zone 1
The opposite can be said about the majority of software applications because most of these programs
are designed in the States : Zone 2
Now if anybody has ever looked at the profiles of an image you will have noted that you can have an endless list of profiles that mean absolutely nothing to ‘Average Joe’. But if you look carefully, there is one consistent element that can be seen between all the different references and that is there are three distinct regions (or zones):
Japan Colour 2001/2/3 for Coated, Uncoated etc. etc. or in our case : Zone 1
U.S. Sheetfed Coated V2, Uncoated V2 etc. etc. or in our case : Zone 2 and finally
Coated FOGRA27 (ISO 12647-2:2004) & Adobe RGB (1998) basically Europe or for this exercise : Zone 3
Now the science bit . . .
Zone 3 or Europe (Namely Germany or the origins of colour calibration) is what all our printing companies use as their bench mark when calibrating print. However, we buy our hardware from Zone 1 and our Software from Zone 2. No matter what you buy nowadays, once it has a micro chip in it then it will have a default configuration. So, even in its very basic of explanations we are looking at a colour image on screen (zone 1) in an application (zone 2) which we want our printer to match (zone 3). Is it any wonder that its a mine field when it comes to matching colours. Whats more that doesn’t even take into consideration the different manufacturers that we have out there!!
So how do we fix it . . .
Even the simplest fixes and ones that don’t require a ‘Masters in Colour Calibration’ can bring you closer to achieving better colour consistency. Be it a Mac or PC we can all access the colour profiles on our computer and all we simply need to do is set this to the Zone 3 standards as our default and the same applies to any software that we run on our computer. By doing this we are all trying to emulate the same colour space and hopefully a better print!
If this has hit a nerve and you would like to get your designed/printed job more colour consistent then why not drop us a line and we will see if we can help you.
