need help printing from illustrator (color management question)

~LizartLizard Aug 16, 2012 Professional General Artist

hi,

i'm needing some help deciding how best to save my work that i created in illustrator. i created everything using the standard CMYK color swatches that came with illustrator. i didn't know these would actually get printed when i started creating it so its too late and too detailed to go back and change it to pantone colors.

my problem is this. i do not know what kind of printer these are being printed on other than a laser printer. i think the person who's printing these is not very savvy when it comes to actual technical color questions like these anyway as i've not been able to get an answer out of them.

what's the best way i can save these and best thing i can do to ensure best print quality? unfortunately i live half way around the world from where these are being printed so i can't just go see a proof. i was planning on saving them as CMYK PNGs but not sure if that's the best and what else i need to do with the color profiles.

thanks in advance.

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Devious Comments

~Black-Allison Aug 18, 2012

You can save PNGs in CMYK? News to me. If this person is just gonna print it out at home honestly it probably doesn't matter. If it's at a print place maybe they'll want a CMYK PDF. If it's at Staples or Walmart those idiots don't know what CMYK is.

~MattCombsArt Aug 17, 2012

its hard to get quality prints from someone who isnt savvy lol and isnt in your area. Finding a good print shop is hard lol. I go to costco to get mine printed. But with their printer they need a RGB file not a cmyk,(lol weird 1st time i heard of an RGB printer) i thought she was lying lol but after looking into their printer and getting the printer profiles, my prints then came out ok, with out the profile the images were printing dark.

What i would suggest is to contact the place printing your images. Ask them what printing profile they use. Get that profile by looking for their model printer and getting the printing profiles for that. Then bring that image into PS, select that printing profile under "proof setup" then "custom. When you have the correct profile that the print house is using then you can adjust the images to match up with that profile........I noticed with mine when i didnt use the profile, in either CMYK or sRGB it would look fine, but it would print out really dark..i got the correct profile, when i selected that printing profile, the image turned dark(like the print) so i knew it was the correct one, and i adjusted the images with that profile to get it to look like the original, then it ended up printing fine...with that said, see what profiles youll need, so u can adjust it on your end. Also not being able to see the prints in person will be hard to see whats off. Id try to find a place locally were u can go in a see it

~egypturnash Aug 16, 2012 Professional Digital Artist

Save as a CMYK TIFF and select the "embed ICC profile" option.

You can do mass changes of color by using edit->select same fill / stroke color.

And in the future, consider using global color swatches as a matter of course; double click on the swatch in the swatch palette and check "global". Everything you draw with this swatch from now on will be linked to it, and if you change the swatch, everything you drew with it changes. This is THE feature that made me choose Illustrator as my main medium.

=WilliamSexton Aug 16, 2012 Digital Artist

All I know is all of my stuff is always printed in CMYK and Png.

And the printer type does matter but I can't help much there.

Sometimes (when done wrong by a bad printer) your pieces will print off far darker than they look on the screen. You just have to find a trusted printing place and hope for the best.

CMYK and Png have worked for me though. Oh and green colors seem to be enhanced like crazy in CMYK and turn out kind of neon... sometimes.

~LizartLizard Aug 17, 2012 Professional General Artist

thanks for all the tips. just to clarify, i'm not looking for a printing place. this is being submitted to someone else that's doing the printing of the fanzine.

=WilliamSexton Aug 17, 2012 Digital Artist

Just as long as they know what they are doing I guess.

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