What the $%^& Colour Is That?

[JamesLam]

I know the screen and the actual output will never be 100% in my world but this is brutal.

The first image is a thumbnail where the background is a flat greygreeny colour. The second is after a calibration thinking something may be off. Blech, not much better as greygreeny turns to purpley.

I've been very lucky so far but I have to figure how to step up my game.

 

[zspace]

What printer and which RIP?

 

[JamesLam]

What printer and which RIP?

HP 365 using Flexi HP 212

Everything today is coming out pinkish.

 

[balstestrat]

LM-LC printhead usually. Obviously same goes for any other worn out printhead.

 

[JamesLam]

HP 365 using Flexi HP 212

Everything today is coming out pinkish.

So, this is all on the heals of the subscription renewal. For the past year more or less everything has been printed with colour correction. Now without colour correction it seems to be back to where it needs to be.

I even went through the calibration twice and the second calibration actually comes in more pink.

 

[bob]

Is this image a bitmap? What flavor of image are you sending? CMYK or RGB? What are your Rendering Intents?

The closest you can come to What You See Is What You Get without undue effort and avoiding having to deal with a coven of coloristas, usually can be achieved with the following settings...

For bitmaps always send RGB images.

Set all of your Rendering Intents to 'No Color Correction' except for bitmaps. Set bitmaps to 'Perceptual'.

Select the highest dither algorithm.

Try to print with the dpi [dots per inch] set at around 4 times the image's ppi [pixels per inch]. I.e. for a 150ppi image print at ~720dpi. More than that is overkill, less than that you might be artificially limiting the color gamut for any given pixel.

 

[JamesLam]

LM-LC printhead usually. Obviously same goes for any other worn out printhead.

About three weeks ago I replaced all of the printheads and inks including the optimizer, and I gave the machine a once over and called it nice things. From there I completed updated calibrations on a few popular media.

All seemed good until the software renewal on Wednesday and everything went to pinkish and purplish. Again I re-calibrated again and completed a control print and all looks good.

If I print with colour correction, which was the best option for the last year, everything was pretty close to were it had to be. Now I get the results I want with no colour correction.

The only thing that changed to start this debacle was the software renewal (I think).