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WOPR · Dec 2, 2003, 06:21 AM

I have a Canon S9000 printer, and produce brochures using Quark 4 running in Classic on OS X 10.2.8. ColorSync control panel appears to be setup for my screen, and I choose ColorSync management when I print from Adobe Reader but spot colours are always different. I print to .ps file using the Distiller PPD and then distil using Acrobat 6 in OS X.

Solid spot colours are always too light no matter what settings I use. Am I hoping for too much?

Any help appreciated.

larkost · Dec 2, 2003, 09:12 AM

Since you are using a consumer level printer (sub $1000), the ICC profiles for the printer (you are using those, aren't you?) are probably designed to make "grandma's" photos look "better". This means that the profiles will not do well with spot colors.

A quick look shows that this printer is not on the gimp-print list (they usually have better ICC profiles), so... short of manually making your own ICC profiles (not trivial), you are out of luck.

Oh... and as much as I hate Epson software (boo.... hiss!!!), and despair the flakey-ness of the hardware, they tend to do much better on the color-matching than Canon... and usually HP (but HP is better than Canon usually).

WOPR · Dec 2, 2003, 09:19 AM

Bizarrely I've just chosen 'no color management' instead of colorsync or canon and it's much much better now! Perfectly acceptable for my needs so I'm happier now.

And don't get me started on Epsons...

We had a 5000 Proofer. Which can't print pure yellow...

And a 1290... Which holds the record for head cleaning - I once had to clean the head 21 times to get the thing working again. Which used up 2 ink cartridges...

larkost · Dec 2, 2003, 01:12 PM

I myself am rangling a 7600... wonderful output... but occasionally an annoying printer. But the color output is exceptionally accurate. I have been running some tests against our print house's proofer (very expensive system), and we are much more consistent in our colors day-to-day, and very close to final output.

This is with a color-sync workflow (everything is set along the way... Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). Always going to PDF first...