Could someone print out a PDF for me to check colors?

[Gilligan]

I have some biz cards we just had printed and they came back quite a bit different than our pint outs did.

Granted, we don't have uber quality printers... but both of our printers both showed them differently (yet the same between the two) vs what we got from the printer.

We are trying to figure out if our proofs just suck or what as we are about to have to reprint them and don't want to make the same mistake again.

[IntegrityShirts]

CMYK gradient blue hues are always touchy in my experience.  I always eye dropper them and cross reference with a pantone spot-to-process swatch book to make sure the blue isn't purple-ly or too muddy.  It's one of those cases where every inkjet will print that differently depending on the color profile.

On second thought it's probably not the blues that are touchy.  It's all process colors but everyone wants blue so I deal with it regularly.

[Sbrem]

were your printouts on the same stock as the cards? That will make a difference, but it's only one of a lot of possibilities. And yes, they probably have much nicer printers too. Think of looking at 50 Hi Def TV's showing a golf match; they all look great, they all look different; which one is right? None of them unfortunately, and we get caught in the middle... Unless you set up a color matching/proofing system, you'll end up with inconsistent results like this.


Steve

[royster13]

Did you get purple?....If you want blue, you usually need to decrease the magenta to at least 15% or even 20% less than the cyan...

[Gilligan]

So basically this is what we have here.

Both of our epsons and a bizhub from next door (she is the customer so she got to see that no matter what, it looked blue to us).

This is my wife's cousin and SUPER easy going... we are going to fix it as she brings us a ton of work and referrals BUT, we want to better understand it.

Yes, Royster... it went purple on us.

Now granted, those blue stars are 100% cyan 100% magenta 0% and 0%... this sounds like a recipe for purple to me as that is a LOT of magenta.

The wife just does it till it looks right and then goes with it.  I think we just learned a lesson there.

BUT a print out should give us CLOSE results should it not?

Attached are the 3 print outs and the actual biz card.  Terrible phone camera pic but you can see the 3 print outs look almost all the same.

[royster13]

Education has a cost and you just paid some tuition......If you go to your print suppliers website, most will have instructions for setting up colours that cause some grief...

[Gilligan]

Can someone please recommend a good swatch book set?

I see stuff from $100 bucks to $3,600 bucks.

[royster13]

In place of "real" swatch sets I bought http://www.amazon.com/Process-Color-Manual-combinations-prepress/dp/B000W91SD2/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346095493&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=process+color+manal and "http://www.amazon.com/Color-Index-Combinations-Formulas-Print/dp/1581802366/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_4

[Gilligan]

Just got me those and a Spyder4Pro!

[IntegrityShirts]

Can someone please recommend a good swatch book set?

I see stuff from $100 bucks to $3,600 bucks.

This one:
http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=1000&ca=1&s=0

Side by side comparisons to show spot/process equivalents.  Great for print design and also great for ink matching software and showing customers the difference in color choices.