We print in house to a Konica Minolta C364e (no Fiery RIP).
I noticed that the colors drift towards RED, sometimes quite heavily. Photo’s of people’s skin makes them look warmed, almost sunburned, and other colors (all colors) seem to drift / lean red.
I recently did a comparison of a print inhouse and the same sent out to print to a professional printer who does digital cmyk printing of larger runs that we can’t do in house. The prints off their press look great.
I know enough about the Konica to know that the model we have has no real color management.
But my question is more of baseline colors. Are there any CYMK color charts that we can buy that can help display what fully managed CYMK colors will be, kind of like a swatch book or swatch chart?
In my spare time, I’m an amateur photographer (and oil painter). I know a bit about color managed workflows. With the model Konica we have, I have no way of making an ICC profile for the papers we use in house.
But I suppose more than that, I was wondering if their are baseline CMYK swatch books or something that I can use to reference what colors might end up looking like. Of course, knowing that there are so many millions of combinations, I’m guessing not.
So perhaps there’s a CMYK reference print I can buy that I could try to use to see how far off the colors are on my printer so that I can know how to adjust them in my documents if I need to.
Someday, I wish we could get a more professional printer that is fully color managed. This Konica has some limitations, though it’s been a good workhorse for us. I wish I could do full bleeds as there are a few out there today that now have this capability.
Anyways, thanks for any responses. I guess I’m not really sure I know what I’m asking for other than some kind of mechanism to baseline our color output against to see how much drift there really is. I don’t even know if professional printers do fully color managed workflows, to be honest. I’m sure many do. But I’m not sure if there’s a color test print that can be purchased to reference against.
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