[tarotbear]

'WHAT YOU SEE (on your Screen)' VS. 'WHAT YOU GET (when it's printed)'


What I designed was Justice with some nice purple-y-gray columns that coordinated with her dress; what the printer (ink vs. digital coloring) returned to me follows it.

Likewise, the first 3 Pents is my original design coloring; the second is what the printer created in ink.

{And both of these are influenced by what my scanner can pick up}

Last night on TGC someone was telling me that all their colors come out saturated and I have to draw/save them in CMYK and then convert them to RGB to get them to ink-print the same colors as I designed; in MS Paint I have no idea what they are talking about; I saved them in PNG. Anyone have a clue?

[Otello]

I don't understand this suggestion, too.
I never used MS Paint, but I just got a quick look; I see you may create the color palette using RGB (if you click on "modify colors", you get a selection-box, in the lover right corner you have the selection for the 3 components: Red, Green and Blue), exactly as with the paint program I use.
Stupid question: did you perform the color calibration on your monitor?

P.S. PNG: Portable Network Graphics; it's just a standard for graphic files; raughly speaking it's a lossless compressed TIFF, it's not related to your problem.

[JOdel]

Well, saturated it ain't. That doesn't appear to be the problem. To me, the problem doesn't appear to be saturation, so much as color shift. Your printer evidently has a setup with a strong bias to yellow. Both of those samples look like a yellow filter was applied to them. And I'm not sure that RGB vs. CMYK would fix that.

I doubt that your files are in CMYK, though, since, in a quick test, attempting to export a CMYK file as a .png gave me a file that ended up as "Indexed Color" rather than a CMYK .png. I suspect that .png may not support CMYK. Or at any rate, not from Photoshop CS 6. (Given that it's a *network* file format, it probably isn't designed for printing.)

Both .tif and .jpg support both color modes, I'm not familiar with Wintel color modes, like .bmp(?) if anyone still actually uses that, so I can't answer for those, but I am sure that at least some of them do. Since one huge advantage to .png is the ability to produce images with a transparent background, if you don't need a transparent background you might be able to consider trying something like .jpg, although it's lossy if you have to resize, and I'm not sure it would address the problem either.

Going from screen to print is always going to come with the possibility of a nasty surprise at some point down the track. What you see on the screen is pure RGB, and it has a far wider gamut than any kind of printing ever will. There are colors that simply cannot be duplicated with ink. And trying to adjust the file in hopes of compensating for the printing is always going to be a stab in the dark.

Converting a file into CMYK and converting it back into RGB can get rid of some colors in an image which are outside gamut for CMYK, because data which is lost with the first conversion does not return with the 2nd. But I'm not convinced that is going to fix the problem of too much yellow.

I submitted my files to MPC in RGB .jpg and was fortunate, since MPC did an excellent job with them. But then, my files didn't have large areas of flat color, as yours do. Yours have much less room for error.

Q: are you scanning the black and white drawing and colorizing it in MS Paint, or are you colorizing in analog and scanning in the colorized version? Does your scanning software give you any color correction latitude, or other features? The more correction you can manage to do *in the scanning* the less you will need to twiddle with in the application that you use to edit the image. Editing loses data. Scanning collects it. If you collect more in the first place, you have more to work with.

Is there a color balance feature anywhere in either your scanning software or your image editor? The opposite of yellow, in RGB is blue. Nudging the image toward blue might concievably help, but it might also just make the mess worse. How much time and expense are you prepared to devote to this? You might do better just finding a different printer, or asking the printer to correct the excessive yellow.

[tarotbear]

I am in Office 2013 in MS PAINT; I see the 'Edit Colors' in the top ribbon. When I click it there is a section of 'Basic colors', 'custom colors' for anything you mix and save, and the rainbow screen where you can play with the values and record the hue, saturation, lum - whatever, and the R G B values. I have used all of these components in the creation of my colorization of the cards.

I have no idea on how to perform a color calibration; this colorization is all new to me!

[tarotbear]

Originally Posted by JOdel

Q: are you scanning the black and white drawing and colorizing it in MS Paint, or are you colorizing in analog and scanning in the colorized version? Does your scanning software give you any color correction latitude, or other features? The more correction you can manage to do *in the scanning* the less you will need to twiddle with in the application that you use to edit the image. Editing loses data. Scanning collects it. If you collect more in the first place, you have more to work with.

Is there a color balance feature anywhere in either your scanning software or your image editor? The opposite of yellow, in RGB is blue. Nudging the image toward blue might concievably help, but it might also just make the mess worse. How much time and expense are you prepared to devote to this? You might do better just finding a different printer, or asking the printer to correct the excessive yellow.

The B/W drawings were scanned and then colorized in PAINT; they were not colored and then scanned.

Oddly - the samples I did for my Majors Plus Four teaser deck were produced by Printer's Studio and their colors look exactly like my colorized images. Unfortunately, PS does not have a box, nor do they market your deck ... So I am considering the color problem to be part of the trade-off for having a box and not having to become the middleman for the sale of my deck.

[Otello]

Originally Posted by tarotbear

I have no idea on how to perform a color calibration; this colorization is all new to me!

Unfortunately the color calibration in brand&model related, (the only possible hint is to search in the Support section of the brand); it's an interactive program you run on your computer to set color consistency of your monitor.

Then - just to stick to the thread's title - if what you print is still different from what you see on the monitor, you may have a problem with the printer...
So to speak: at the office we have 4 Laser ColorPrinter, one of them produce darker images then the other 3 (which are consistent), nobody seams to know why.

The last solution is to play with the filters of the printer driver (should be a tab of the print dialog-box, but I fear it's brand&model related, too) and try to compensate the distortion.

[tarotbear]

Here's a better example - same card - two different printing companies.

The Left card was printed by The Printer's Studio - it is closest to my original colors - the mulberry Tower, the color of the clouds, etc.

The Right card was printed by The Game Grafter using the exact same file - its colors are slightly different. As JOdel says - there seems to be a yellow filtering to their colors ....

***ETA*** I recall once that Bill Greer (of the Morgan-Greer) - whose deck also has a yellow 'cast' - told me the original paintings he made are NOT yellow-y; he says Morgan scrimped on the color printing process.

[Babalon Jones]

Oh dear. Usually I have champagne tastes and a beer budget, lol but I actually like the warmth of the one on the right.

[JOdel]

A warm cast tends to please the eye in most cases. That's why a lot of magazines appear to have an added warm boost to the photos. Particularly on skin tones. NOT necessarily a good thing for graphics, however.

Since you are working in RGB there is always the chance that you may have some colors in a file that are not reproducible in ink, but while changing the color mode to CMYK will probably dull down the overall appearance of the file, an overall color cast is usually on printer's side. That is a problem that's well downstream from where you are operating.

ETA: MPC does boxes. You can order a solid or a window box for a dime per deck (the shrinkwrapped cards are shipped inside the box -- also shrinkwrapped). The basic boxes come in white, or you can do a custom box (solid) on a provided template. I didn't check on the price of those.

[tarotbear]

BTW - What does CMYK stand for, and what does it mean as far as color reproduction, exactly?

This is what The Game Crafter says about 'Color Profiles' : (hope this opens for you)

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/help/color-profiles