I need advice

[mark in tx]

it's weird!!! I understand what you mean but your printer, prints in cmyk

NO!

Your printer uses CMYK inks to reproduce color.
No printer uses RGB inks.

It will only accurately reproduce colors if the amounts of CMYK ink in proper relation to each other are set in the profile.

well I tried the ol export as a tiff and bring it back in and its the same color. Thats good, but when it comes out of illustrator the colours somehow change as a bitmap.

The color workspace in Illustrator has to be set.
Without having the monitor properly calibrated, you are not looking at the correct colors anyway.

I print files all day that are mixed vector and bitmap, with spot colors in them.
I usually print them as a tif, output from photoshop, or Corel, but the only reason they print correctly the first time, everytime, is because my whole system has been set up to follow the proper color workflow, and has been profiled.

 

[Just Another Sign Guy]

Mark has given you a tremendous amount of good information. It is all about profiling I don;t know why people have such a hard time understanding this if you are not looking at true representations, if your equipment is not profiled and calibrated you are always going to be working in circles and looking for work arounds.

 

[gabagoo]

I will give it a try
thanks Pro!!

ok I tried. I went into illustrator and made a box in pantone 293c and saved it first as an eps file then as a tiff cmyk then a tiff rgb, then a jpg cmyk and lastly a jpg rgb
the eps file was dead on naturally, all the bitmaps were the lighter version except the cmyk jpg, which although it was not the lighter color still changed its shading enough that it would not have worked.

 

[mark in tx]

all the bitmaps were the lighter version except the cmyk jpg, which although it was not the lighter color still changed its shading enough that it would not have worked.

Because your settings for Illustrator are not correct.

Besides, you shouldn't output bitmaps from Illustrator anyway.

 

[graphixtogo]

In Flexi, look under the Edit menu, look at Color Settings and check your Rendering Intents. Like mentioned earlier, the rendering intents for vectors and bitmaps can be set differently to achieve different outputs. Try setting the bitmap intent to the same intent as the vector intent and see what the output does.

 

[gabagoo]

In Flexi, look under the Edit menu, look at Color Settings and check your Rendering Intents. Like mentioned earlier, the rendering intents for vectors and bitmaps can be set differently to achieve different outputs. Try setting the bitmap intent to the same intent as the vector intent and see what the output does.

I will try that next