When we speak of color there are many terms out there- RGB, CMYK, Pantone/PMS, Hex, and much more. But as for working in a colorspace- as most of you already know, there’s RGB and CMYK, and the end product determines the colorspace. RGB is for screens and CMYK is for printing. And while that sounds simple enough, with improving technology and programs that are made to be more consumer friendly and available to Joe Schmoe (Canva, I’m looking at you!), Joe Schmoe thinks he’s now a designer. When, in fact, Joe Schmoe went to school for real estate. Or business. Or is a stay at home mom.
But you get the point. Untrained people + designing stuff on the internet they want to later print = problems for local printers OR Joe Schmoe ordering printed items online and being disappointed/angry with the results.
So for all you Noobs or Joe Schmoes out there, this blog entry is for you.
When you design something for print in RGB instead of CMYK, it can have varying results. Everything could print just fine. Or, more often than not, there will be color issues as seen in the image to the right. This particular example was created in Publisher and exported as a .pdf. When looking at the publisher file, the blues are all the same. And, when looking at the color separations in Acrobat under the output preview, you get a CMYK breakdown (if they even know to look at that). To the untrained person, that would be enough for them to say, this is CMYK, why are there issues? But the trained person will know to dig deeper and instead of looking at the “all” output to change it to CMYK and then RGB (or Spot Color). That’s where you’ll find the actual problem, because it isn’t CMYK at all!
How do we combat this issue? Well, most designers know they can combat this with converting colors to U.S. SWOP/ convert to destination when exporting. In this particular case, the person’s Publisher version did not have the option, and in fact, did not have any color management options whatsoever. So when it’s printed, the blues, that are in fact the same color blue, print as different ones (top in example). This can easily be fixed by placing it into an Indesign layout and converting the color when exporting to .pdf. Then all the colors will match and your amateur designer will be happy with the fruits of his labor (bottom in example).
Or, we can make everyone happy and everyone’s job a little easier by hiring a professional designer.
And that, my friends is my lecture of the day. *Jumps off soapbox.
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