iMac Color Matching

I work on my schools yearbook, which because of the publishing company, must be designed in Adobe CS2 Products on iMacs.

We destined our cover in Photoshop CS2 (its a 1.9 GB file...) but when we got it back from the publisher to preview it came out color tinted. They claim they printed the exact colors in the file and any future reprint would come out the same way.

Normally I work with PC’s so forgive me if this is a rather simple question. How do I match the colors on the screen (preferable only in Adobe products) to the printout?

Thanks in advance!

Google is your friend. This should get you started.

http://www.macworld.com/2005/03/reviews/monitorcalibrator/index.php
http://photoshop911.typepad.com/help/color_issues/index.html
http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html

What you could do is ask them for a ppd file (Printer Press Discription file) and use that to create a postscriptfile by using that PPD as your printer file and send this to them, what I use a lot is a Pantone book with all the ink colors and place some colors from the book in PhotoShop and see if it matches on the screen as it looks in the book.

Monitors (aspecialy tft) will fool you all the time so you need a reference, the pantone libary is good for this.

better yest but expensive get your monitor calibrated

Greets Dimmy

Having owned a Prepress shop for more than 10 years, I can assure you that you’ll never get an accurate representataion of what you see on your iMac monitor when you go to press. There’s no short explanation for it, but setting up a proper colorsync workflow is very time consuming and requires extra hardware.

You should always have your printer pull color proofs prior to going to press; the color proof is the contract of what the final print run should look like.

Ryan, the Yearbook printing company offers color proofs for the cover. When viewing the first print, we discovered this. But, asking them to print more than one more is very expensive due to some funny conditionals with our contract. We just need to have the iMac (note that the monitor is integrated) look fairly close to the printout which is sitting next to the monitor. I’ll try and ask for a printer profile but I doubt they’ll give us one... they have more than one type of printer and facility they use to print the books.

There are so many variables at play here, and it’s such a specialized application that it probably would be a lot cheaper (actually!) and infinitely faster for them to make the color moves to get it where it needs to be.

Given that, the ambient light source, the color of your walls and desk, the version of your applications, your color settings in those applications, the color settings in your colorsync control panel, the OS version you’re running, the color space you worked on everything in, the way you captured your images, what you’ve done to them since then, what light you’re looking at proofs under next to your workstation, and a ton of other finer details and variables will affect the ultimate outcome and suggested course of action.

I spent five years and five figures figuring this stuff out, and unfortunately there is no cheap and fast fix.

The solution to this situation was to have the plant match the colors of a printout we are sending.

Sometimes it helps to bypass the issue entirely!

Which is why I said have them "make the color moves to get it where it needs to be". :p