A tip for the artists

Favorite wip of the day...


Now for the chit chat:

A color specialist for the top 5 US magazines came to my house one day (my parents' connection) and showed me how to prep my work in color for the printer...

Often the artists will find the printer drop some colors from their CG work, and flattens or muddy up the image, here's why~~~

Computer can do colors in a wider range a printer can ever do. So in the attempts to match color in printing, the printer will often TRY to match up similar colors all to one color. Like if you have 5 shades of reds on the CG, the printer can only print one red, so it pulled all 5 colors to that one red.

For skin, often what happens is the artist is not aware of how much K (black/CMYK scale) they are using when they painted it, but whenever a printer prints BLACK, black is always going to be a heavier substance, it will always show up first on the paper. So you want to avoid your skin color or sensitive browns getting muddy, use info in Photoshop and try to find out how much K is in the mix. If it's anything about 15%, you have a muddy picture.

And ink has grain sizes, it's dot often increase by 25% when it's printed on paper, so your reproduction lineart is usually a bit thicker than your original.


Try to adjust all the K to C, Cyan, it's a better shadow color for printer to print than K. Even if the Printer takes RGB files, it really converts it to CYMK files before they print it, so always save your files in CMYK before you convert it to RGB for the printers. They didn't want people to submit CMYK because if the user's settings are not matching to their printer, it messed up their printing run. So they request for most commonly used RGB then covert them to CMYK.


Also, he mentioned that most monitors are only 85% accurate interns of color compare to print, they will always be off, and adjust the monitor to less brightness to match the paper will be the best way to go. :)



Picture below shows my current setting after he changed it, i was on some.... acient Adobe 96 setting he had never seen before.... :faint:



(this was a few months ago... amazing how much i remembered from the time he explained it... lol) Too bad i don't remember exactly how he did the customized black adjustment, when i find out i will share it.