How important is color to you? You’ve gone through all the work of branding your business, creating your logo and choosing the right colors to represent you to the world. Now you’re going to the printer or signmaker to produce the documents and signs you need to present that image to potential customers and when you get your product, the color is not what you expected! What could have gone wrong? You reviewed the inputs and were happy, yet the outputs were different!
While the computerization of the printing industry has reduced some of the variables controlling color output, it has also increased the variance in other ways. One reason is that different systems have different color capabilities, the two most common are the monitors we use for design work vs. the printers we use for product output. The monitor is a light emitting device which uses the RGB color system. Each “pixel” of the monitor is made up of three dots (one red, green, and blue) that are very close to each other. These three color dots can be turned on in any combination from just one to all three at a time so that the resulting image of the pixel to the viewer represents a variety of colors beyond just red, green, and blue.
The printers we print on, however, are pigment based devices which lay down color and reflect the light around them. They still use dots of color, similar to the monitor, but because they reflect light rather than project it, different base colors are used for the dots. The term “CMYK” indicates the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black colors that are used as the basis for these color dots which are again, placed in very close proximity to each other and give the perception of a million different color options. While this sounds like a more than adequate pallet of colors, it is significantly less than the 16.7 million capable from the monitor’s RGB system, which is one reason for this discussion. Your monitor can produce colors that aren’t possible to reproduce on a CMYK printer.
Another variable goes back to the monitors. Monitor manufacturers compete with each other in producing brilliant output, each trying to look their best over their competition. As a result, their default settings tend to turn up the brightness and color “temperature” to exceed that of the natural sunlight. Designing your logo and signs on “out of the box” monitors sets up unrealistic expectations that create a further gap between the design and the printed output.
At Fairchild Custom Signs, we implement the latest in technology and processes that compensate for these differences in systems to ensure that your finished product is as close to your intended color as possible. We will also print samples so that you know exactly what you will get, before you commit to the order. Our goal is complete customer satisfaction and we accomplish that through establishing clear and realistic expectations. We prefer leaving the surprises to your birthday J
Contact us today to find out how we can improve the quality of all your signage needs!
Written by: Fairchild Custom Signs
