Arrgggg - MacBook's colours SOOO off

[joosid]

Howdy everyone - I just got a new MacBook and I've designed some stuff, sent it to print, and every time a proof comes back to me, my colours are so incredibly off. I'm having the most trouble with tans/creams - they all print some shade of fluorescent weird green. I've tried over and over to calibrate my monitor to match the prints, and it gets a bit better every time, but it's still definitely not right. What's the best way to get my monitor calibrated correctly?

 

[Alexis]

What are the CMYK values of your creams?

 

[chrisgrieve]

hi there,

dont really know alot about this, but if you check in your utilities, there should be an app called 'coloursync' maybe worth having a look into that.

sorry if this is does not help.



chrisgrieve

 

[joosid]

These values are for a colour that looks tan/champagne on my monitor:
C: 3
M: 0
Y: 23
K: 0
Maybe you can plug that in on your correctly calibrated Mac and let me know if it's my Mac, or maybe it's the print company I use??

 

[Alexis]

I get a pale lemon colour with those values. There's only 3% cyan in there anyway - nowhere near enough to start getting a green hue. We use 20" iMacs and have just calibrated by going through prefs>color>calibrate, so nothing fancy.

I'd say it was a printer problem with an over the top cyan shift.

 

[dtownley1]

I get a pale lemon colour with those values. There's only 3% cyan in there anyway - nowhere near enough to start getting a green hue. We use 20" iMacs and have just calibrated by going through prefs>color>calibrate, so nothing fancy.

I'd say it was a printer problem with an over the top cyan shift.

I get the same colour, just as I thought I would, and I'm on a macbook. Maybe checking your calibration is in order. Go to system preferences, displays, then colour. I have mine set to Color LCD there, but I think most others were pretty similar. If they still appear odd, you might want to try creating a new calibration setting (just make sure you name it appropriately).

On my old iBook, at some early stage, I accidentally increased the contrast (ctrl+opt+apple+<or>) and for over a year, I thought my calibration was out No amount of recalibrating would fix this, until I again, accidentally discovered the shortcut, and solved all my problems. Before this, playing an avi file in Mplayer at full screen, and quitting while it was playing seemed to inexplicably fix this temporarliy. No idea how or why that worked, but it did.

Slim chance this is the same case, but try hitting 'ctrl+opt+apple+<' 5 or so times and see if it makes any difference. That's about all the advice I can offer, short of buying one of those expensive monitor calibration devices.

 

[MacHeadCase]

Which colour profile are you using for your screen? Are you using Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark or InDesign as app for the printers? All these apps need to share a common colour space with the monitor so there is no confusion between what you see and what will come out of the printer's.

I think it would be best if you set Adobe RGB 1998 as colour profile for your monitor and you would need to know with which colour profile the printer is working with and which type of paper the document will be printed on (coated, uncoated or newsprint).

Also be aware that some colours do not transfer well from monitor to paper. Monitor uses RGB as colour space which is an Additive Colour scheme while print is CMYK which is a Substractive Colour scheme. Very big differences there in technology and how colour gets treated and reproduced.