Print your own Color Swatches

jgroep

jgroep

New Member
Hi! My name is Jochem Jean van de Groep and eventhough there are a lot of Color Swatch fan decks out there, they almost never are printed in the printing conditions you use. As you know your printing device, profile and paper use.

On Kickstarter I created a project with two PDF documents to print your own Color Swatches so you can always reproduce and match its colors.

PrintSafeColors: Print your own Color Swatches https://kck.st/2kTskb4

Have a colorful day!
 
Isn't this way Pantone swatches were invented?

User selects Pantone colour from swatch book. Applies it. Adjusts their own printing devices to closely match pantone colours. There's even SpyderPro to sync your profiles.

Once all lined up you're ready to go.

Problem with this system is that you print your own colour swatch, based on what your colour printer outputs - and then when you send it to someone else to print for you professionally the colours are completely different.

This negates all sanity when it comes to colour management.

Plus I often see people send in print ready files using their own spot colours called "COMPANY GREEN" and what happens there is that it goes to a RIP in a printers, sees "COMPANY GREEN" spot colour, tries to find a match in the database and it can't - so it picks a colour based on certain things, and sometimes that "COMPANY GREEN" can turn to red or magenta, or yellow - or whatever the RIP picks.

It's important to use the Colour Matching Systems that are already in place - especially for designers/printers as we can all work from the ONE book and produce the same colour across many different output devices.
 
You're correct for Pantone and its use. Only as most designers/printers have a tight relationship you can let your printer/repro print the Color Swatches and use its values for a perfect match also.
The following might seem weird, but especially the sRGB Color Swatches are golden for offices and their documents. The office user builds an understanding how the rgb color is printed on paper and the printer/repro can reproduce without disappointments.
 
Hang on a minute.... wouldn't it be more sensible to ensure that the computers being used in an office are correctly configured to CMYK rather than trying to colour match on screen RGB with what will come out of a CMYK printer?
 
Most office suites use RGB for color. If you can input CMYK it is without a proper set up CMS, so a 100% in CMYK is like 255 in RGB.
sRGB is default in office suites and gladly all printers do have a sRGB output profile.
 
jgroep said:
You're correct for Pantone and its use. Only as most designers/printers have a tight relationship you can let your printer/repro print the Color Swatches and use its values for a perfect match also.
The following might seem weird, but especially the sRGB Color Swatches are golden for offices and their documents. The office user builds an understanding how the rgb color is printed on paper and the printer/repro can reproduce without disappointments.
Click to expand...


You really think a Joe Soap in an office fulfilling a job to pay the bills is going to be arsed to buy and then print out a full suite of colour swatches so that they can match to your system?

Most companies are given brand guidelines. Which include correct CMYK and Pantone related logos, swatches and usage. They also come with the RGB values, RGB logos and formats correct for Office suites.
They will also be given Letterhead, etc and Powerpoint samples with the correct branding applied. If the branding was supplied correctly.

What you're proposing is that the average joe with no experience in what they're doing create a whole suite of their own colour values that don't match pre-approved brand guidelines.

It's a nice idea - but I can't see an average office worker being arsed with any of it.


You're better off adjusting the printing profiles in the office to match the approved brand guidelines.

What you're doing is proposing the opposite, which is madness.
 
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