Colors not printing correctly Roland VP-540

[No Lemon]

I'm kinda new to the vinyl industry and have a question.

I have the following.
Roland VP-540 printer/cutter
3m 40c-10 vinyl
Factory ECO SOL ink

I have printed a few things and the colors are not correct.

I made 5 1" x 1" squares. One red, yellow, green, blue and red in Illustrator using CMYK color swatches.

I printed them in Versa Works and the black looks kinda black, purple,redish. The yellow looks fine, the green looks a little light, the blue looks purple and the red looks ok.

I used crop marks and the blacks looks great. Very black and no lines.

I used high quality 1080x1080 in Versa Works.

Do I need to make adjustments in Versa Works or do I have something wrong?

 

[ikarasu]

I'm kinda new to the vinyl industry and have a question.

I have the following.
Roland VP-540 printer/cutter
3m 40c-10 vinyl
Factory ECO SOL ink

I have printed a few things and the colors are not correct.

I made 5 1" x 1" squares. One red, yellow, green, blue and red in Illustrator using CMYK color swatches.

I printed them in Versa Works and the black looks kinda black, purple,redish. The yellow looks fine, the green looks a little light, the blue looks purple and the red looks ok.

I used crop marks and the blacks looks great. Very black and no lines.

I used high quality 1080x1080 in Versa Works.

Do I need to make adjustments in Versa Works or do I have something wrong?

I'm presuming you don't have custom profiles made up for your machine? You'll need a spectrophotometers, and you'll need to make a profile for every media you use. It's a big learning curve.... Or, you can be like most companies... Print out a huge pantone chart, and go in and match colors that way. Your better off starting off properly, and learning how to make profiles, or paying someone to make them for you. But until thats in your budget... I'm not sure if Versaworks has it, but I imagine it does... Find a pantone chart, print it off... Then match the color you want, to whats been printed on your chart.

http://www.xrite.com/categories/calibration-profiling/i1publish Something like this. You dont need the WHOLE kit that does monitors too.. but the price difference isnt that high between the kits, and you may as well do both.

 

[player]

What profile did you use in VW?

 

[FrankW]

If you don't have the ability to make own profiles (neccessary for maximum color accuracy), search for an instruction of the "Roland color system library". This doesn't help with photos, but with colouring vector graphics. You will find infos on the web.

 

[Correct Color]

The best thing you can do at this point, honestly, is hire Correct Color to come set up your color workflow and printer profiles, and teach you how to get files to your printer correctly.

It's actually guaranteed to be the best money you'll ever spend.

 

[JasonMeisnerSTS]

If you are using 3M media, you should go to 3M online and download profiles for the media you have. That is your best bet and all you need to do. Additionally, if you want to achieve an extended color gamut, our inks are plug and play drop ins with the OEM Roland inks and our users get better reds with the magenta and save roughly 40% on the ink consumables. let me know if I can further assist.

 

[petepaz]

also don't compare your printed blacks to the crop marks. for some reason the crop marks do not print 4 c/p they print 100% black. found this out one day printing and my crop marks were set but not printing. it would go through the motions but no marks. turns out the cart was empty and it didn't register for some reason.

 

[No Lemon]

What profile did you use in VW?

Originally I used "generic vinyl 1". I then downloaded IJ40-10R and its prints basically the same if not exact.

I went to 3m's site and they don't show a profile for intermediate calendar gloss? (40C-10R)

I went into the VersaWorks color adjustment and moved the cyan and black to +5 and it darkened up the a little but still not right.

Im getting ready to print the color library later tonight.

All I looking for right now is to get blue instead of purple and a darker black for a real basic job I have.

Thanks for the hep.

 

[No Lemon]

I got the black printing real nice and black by going into Quaity/ Color management/Properties and checking on preserve primary color. Blue is still purple

 

[CSOCSO]

I might not know a lot of stuff but one thing is for sure. Even tho you have CMYK inks forget about cmyk files. You need to print from RGB files! Otherwise black wont be deep black. red will be pink, blue will be purple, etc.
Been there done that. I am using roland machines for 7 years or so. I have mess around with all kind of profiles and color management and nothing helped.
I would never pay anyone to try to fix the color management problem. NO WAY! I have a feeling that whatever you are going to do you will not print an "exact" color from psd not tiff.
All you gotta do is print rgb tiff files and colors will be vibrant.
I have done hundreds of vehicle wraps each year plus who know how many signs and never had a problem with colors. Basically no customers ever said anything. If they did that's because they tried to compare the colors to their desktop pinter's colors or their monitor's colors which we all know that it won't match.
Printing in RGB will give you a pretty accurate colors what you see on your monitor.
The only time you need exact colors when a customer will require to print a specific pantone colors but then you should use eps files, not photoshop files. You can also learn to use the roland spot colors. It's a pain to find the colors you need but whenever I need to print 100% black then you need to print spot color.
( whatever you do you will never be able to print 100% black unless you use spot color. cmyk, rgb or whatever color management and profile to print black the printer will use all 4 pigments!)

 

[CSOCSO]

I got the black printing real nice and black by going into Quaity/ Color management/Properties and checking on preserve primary color. Blue is still purple

I am not on my computer but in versaworks go to Media then click on print color system library
When you print this you can not mess around with any settings. Print it. If everything comes out good then it's your files. Not the settings!
Whatever you did to the settings i think you should put it back to default. ( if you decide to reinitialize the software you will need the ip address of the printer and you will lose all files from the queue A B and settings.

 

[GVP]

Have you printed out the test print from Versaworks? The result of that should give you a guide as to if it's the printer or your files.

 

[No Lemon]

Have you printed out the test print from Versaworks? The result of that should give you a guide as to if it's the printer or your files.

Not yet but i'm going to. Thanks

 

[ikarasu]

I might not know a lot of stuff but one thing is for sure. Even tho you have CMYK inks forget about cmyk files. You need to print from RGB files! Otherwise black wont be deep black. red will be pink, blue will be purple, etc.
Been there done that. I am using roland machines for 7 years or so. I have mess around with all kind of profiles and color management and nothing helped.
I would never pay anyone to try to fix the color management problem. NO WAY! I have a feeling that whatever you are going to do you will not print an "exact" color from psd not tiff.
All you gotta do is print rgb tiff files and colors will be vibrant.
I have done hundreds of vehicle wraps each year plus who know how many signs and never had a problem with colors. Basically no customers ever said anything. If they did that's because they tried to compare the colors to their desktop pinter's colors or their monitor's colors which we all know that it won't match.
Printing in RGB will give you a pretty accurate colors what you see on your monitor.
The only time you need exact colors when a customer will require to print a specific pantone colors but then you should use eps files, not photoshop files. You can also learn to use the roland spot colors. It's a pain to find the colors you need but whenever I need to print 100% black then you need to print spot color.
( whatever you do you will never be able to print 100% black unless you use spot color. cmyk, rgb or whatever color management and profile to print black the printer will use all 4 pigments!)

No offense... But most of what you said is wrong. A properly made profile that's calibrated will be 10x more accurate than what your doing. Your way may be fine with car wraps, and other prints... But when a customer comes in asking for a perfect Starbucks green match, or something else... You'll have a hard time trying to get that match. Sometimes "good enough" just isn't good enough.

And are you aware monitors need to be calibrated also? You can calibrate your monitorz, and your printer so that colors are a bear 100℅ match (to your printer capabilities). CMYK can't produce EVERY color, but with a correct profile, you'll be a lot closer.

Not everyone needs to make correct profiles. But I do a lot of work that needs near perfect color matching... I was printing a lot of swatches, wasting a lot of material. Got a spectro, made a custom profile... And so far I havent had to print 1 swatch. I haven't been using it for long, and I'm sure there's goinf to be a time when I do have to... But, point is color profiling is not a scam.

Edit: also... Try 75,68,67,90. For CMYK values for a true black. No need to go RGB.

 

[No Lemon]

Latest findings.

I ran a printer test print through the function menu and it came out pretty nice.

I made a file with a program called Inkscape witch is a free program similar to Illustrator and printed 6 1/2" squares with colors. Black, red, yellow, green and 2 blues. I then ran that file through VersaWorks and my colors came out correct when I printed it. My black is black and blue is blue.

I copied and pasted the image into Illustrator and saved it then ran it through VersaWorks and printed it my black is brownish red and my blue is purple.

I am thinking I have something setup wrong in Illustrator now?

Any Ideas what I should check for?

 

[Correct Color]

I would never pay anyone to try to fix the color management problem. NO WAY!

That is indeed your misfortune. It would have saved you literally tens of thousands of dollars over the course of seven years, and made you much better at your craft as well.

 

[CSOCSO]

That is indeed your misfortune. It would have saved you literally tens of thousands of dollars over the course of seven years, and made you much better at your craft as well.

Save me money? What are you talking about??? Never ever had to reprint anything because the color was wrong. I know NONE of the shops around me have anything calibrated. NONE of them. I know all of them.

 

[CSOCSO]

Latest findings.

I copied and pasted the image into Illustrator and saved it then ran it through VersaWorks and printed it my black is brownish red and my blue is purple.

Did you read what i wrote? You are probably going from RGB to a CMYk document.

 

[GVP]

As others have said, check the color mode you have set in Irritator - we print most in CMYK, but I do find some photos reproduce more vibrantly in RGB. Also, what file format are you using between Illy and Versaworks?

 

[player]

Yes.