Printing problems - purplish output from commercial printer

[christo]

Sorry to be such a boor lately. I have been using Clara's excellent tutorial on One Easy Way to Make a Difficult Selection, with what I had thought was great success. It was easy to follow the instructions and the results looked spectacular on the screen, both in PhotoShop 7 and PageMaker 7, on my Mac at home and the PC at work. However, today the boss pointed out to me that in most cases, when the images were printed they were coming out looking purple. I was dumbfounded. I am still looking into this to get some input from the printer, but wanted to know if anyone else had any similar results, thoughts or insights?

[DannyRaphael]

Are you printing in your office/at your place of business -or- outsourcing the work?

Color or black and white?

Are your monitors calibrated?

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[FYI - I changed the thread title from 'Sorry' to 'Printing problems - purplish output' so more members would notice it and hopefully offer suggestions.]

[christo]

Outsourcing to a commercial printer. CYMK color. Nothing has been calibrated.

[Ant]

tsk tsk. What is it that you expect when you are basically setting colors in the dark (Nothing is calibrated)?

Read up on color by the numbers. Then at least you can get in the right area -even if color blind.

[DannyRaphael]

I'm no pro by any stretch when it comes to this type of thing, so take this with a grain of salt. I'm sure your printer can provide detailed specs. on requirements and probably has some sort of "Frequently Asked Questions" document to help new customers over common humps. Even if the terminology looks "Greek," at least this type of info would lay groundwork on "where you gotta go" so you can start nibbling away at getting there.

Monitor calibration will most likely be among the diagnostic / corrective action tasks, so that would be an area to start looking into.

[tived]

have you checked the color space you supplied the images in, and have to check with your printer what colorspace his printer is working in, in best case try to get his printer profile so you can softproof. otherwise, convert you files to CMYK (US Web Coated v2 or Euroscale Coated) softproof again

Ofcourse, all of this won't work unless your monitor is calibrated.

let us know how you go

Henrik

[Swampy]

As Henrik said, at the very minimum use US Web Coated v2 for you CMYK color space. Next best is to ask your printer to give you their ICC profile and use theirs to convert to CMYK.