How accurate will my printed colours be?

At Signboom, we produce in-house colour ICC profiles for all of our different printer and media combinations, for optimum colour accuracy. However, by nature CMYK digital printing is incapable of matching all desired colours due to its reduced colour gamut.

If colour accuracy is critical and the order size is large, it is best to order a small version of your print first for verification, as Signboom does not guarantee colour accurate prints.

 

Achieving Rich Blacks

Just setting your blacks to 100% K within your designs will not produce rich blacks. In order to achieve beautiful deep blacks, it is best to utilize a four colour black by setting all of your colour channels C, M, Y & K to 100% ( or set R, G & B all to 0 ). Additionally, setting the colour space in your native file to RGB versus CYMK will not only help to achieve richer blacks but will also improve the overall colour depth of your images.

 

Other Notes on Colour Accuracy

  • Colour shifts between different prints and medias may occur, especially if they are printed at different times.
  • Vector art such as text and logos will print differently when rasterized in your file or exported as a tiff or bitmap, as it will be processed as an image rather than vector art.
  • Your colour accuracy will always be better if the document set up in your application is set to CMYK mode rather than RGB. (Images can remain in RGB if you wish.)
  • Pantone spot colours will print more accurately and more consistently if they are left as a spot colour in your file rather than converting it to CMYK. However, all specialty Pantone colours including metallics and fluorescents cannot be matched using standard CYMK ink sets and should NEVER be used in files sent to Signboom as the results can be very unpredictable.
  • Naming of spot colours is important so that they can be recognized by our Pantone spot colour matching system. They must match the exact Pantone Convention in name and case, as per these examples: PANTONE 100 C, PANTONE Rubine Red C. The characters "CV", "CVC", "U", "UV", and "UVC" on the end are treated the same as "C". "PMS 100" and "PMS 100 C" would be valid titles for your swatches. "PMS 100 C (1)" would not be valid..
  • Any Pantone spot colours that interact with a transparency in your file will be disregarded by our Pantone spot colour matching system.