I used RGB black by accident instead of rich black, and man it looked awful on that porous stock. Does anyone know a good default CMYK mix for dark inks on uncoated paper?
I work at a small print shop in Cleveland and back in March a client brought in a business card job with this specific teal color. I pulled what I thought was the right Pantone swatch and told them it would match. When the cards came out it was this horrible greenish-blue mess, not even close. The client was super nice about it but I felt awful. Then my boss walked over and showed me I was looking at the uncoated swatch for a coated paper job. Five years I had been doing that and nobody ever corrected me. Has anyone else made that same dumb mistake or am I the only one?
I designed them all in RGB on my laptop, sent the file without converting to CMYK, and the shop said the grays looked perfect on screen but came off the press as muddy silver messes, which cost me $320 in reprints and a very stressful two days begging the printer for a rush job. Has anyone else gotten burned by not double checking their file settings before shipping?
I designed a big 24x36 poster for a music festival last summer. Sent them the PDF and everything looked GREAT on my screen. Turned out my coworker saved the master file in RGB instead of CMYK. The blues came out MUDDY and the neon pink turned into a dull gray. Cost me $1,200 to reprint the whole run of 500 posters. Has anyone else had a color mode mix-up bite them this bad?
I do my own proofs for small flyer jobs at my shop (dog grooming, but I do my own marketing). Last month I sent a batch of 100 coupons to a local print shop and got them back with every single one showing a weird green tint on the dog photos. Turns out I had saved the file in RGB instead of CMYK, you know, a total rookie mistake. My eyes went straight to the first coupon and I just froze, counting them up one by one on the counter. All 100 were wrong, which felt like a personal record for worst proof ever. The print shop guy said 'your greens are just super vibrant on screen' and I wanted to crawl under the table. Has anyone else ever gotten a whole batch back and just had to laugh at the number?
I was printing a batch of 500 flyers for a local band in Portland and thought I'd save money by using uncoated stock. The magenta channel just exploded into this weird neon mess that looked nothing like my proof. Is it even possible to get accurate skin tones on uncoated paper or should I just stick to coated for people photos?
Had a 500 piece run of business cards with tiny white text over a dark photo. Spent hours trying to trap it right, then just set the black text to overprint. Cost me a 2 minute fix instead. Has anyone else just given up and used overprint for tricky text?
I used to trust the software to handle all my color separations for me, but after that disaster where every cyan and magenta bled together into a mess that looked like a watercolor painting, I switched to doing them by hand in Photoshop about six months ago and now I catch issues before they hit the print run instead of after; has anyone else found that manual control saves them from similar nightmares?
Turned out the client's massive EPS file had an embedded RGB gradient that nobody caught until after the run of 500 brochures hit the floor.
Back in '08 when I was running a little quick print shop in Akron, I'd sit there with a 10x loupe going over every film output for dot gain. Now I just use a cheap desktop densitometer I got off eBay for $60 and it catches bad separations in seconds. Still miss the ritual of it though, like being a detective or something. Any of you old timers still break out the loupe for nostalgia?
I ignored him on a rush job for a local real estate brochure in Austin last month. The faces came out looking like they had jaundice... just a sickly greenish tint. Had to reprint 500 copies on my own dime. Guess he was right after all. Anyone else get weird advice from old-timers that actually saved your butt?
I work at a small shop in Portland and we ran the numbers yesterday. Fifty jobs in one month where the customer supplied RGB files claiming they were CMYK. Some even had a note saying 'converted to CMYK' but the metadata showed sRGB. That's gotta be some kind of record for us. Anyone else seeing a spike in this lately or is it just our clients?
He literally had a folder of failed proofs where my dark teal came out looking like swamp green every time, and that one sentence changed my whole approach to picking PMS values.
The client's blue was coming out purple because someone had the file in RGB instead of CMYK. Has anyone else caught a color shift like that right before the run?
My boss gave me a grimy Pantone swatch book from 1993 to match a corporate logo for a flyer last month. I used a bright cyan from it and the client's actual printed logo came out looking teal instead of blue. Do you folks keep old swatch books on hand or toss them after a few years?
Back in design school over in Austin, my professor told me to always design in RGB and convert to CMYK at the very end. I followed that for my first real job at a print shop. Big mistake. I sent a client's wedding invite to press and all the pastel pinks turned into this muddy gray-brown mess. Lost that account and had to explain why 500 invites were ruined. Anyone else get burned by bad advice from a teacher that didn't work in the real world?
They sent out 1,200 menus for a busy diner and the tomatoes came out neon orange because nobody checked the color profiles. Has anyone else seen a whole business accept that kind of garbage because they didn't want to redo the files?
Last summer I designed a set of wedding invitations for a friend's wedding in Austin. I checked the RGB preview for days, everything looked fine. Turns out the file was still in RGB mode when I sent it to the print shop. They printed it as is and all the skin tones came out a weird blue-gray mess. My friend was super chill about it, but I had to pay $160 for a rushed reprint. Now I check my color mode settings three times before exporting anything. Has anyone else had a color shift disaster that cost way more than you expected?
Last month I sent a brochure to a local print shop in Lincoln. I checked the proof on my monitor, everything looked perfect, colors were bright and the images popped. I approved it and paid $200 upfront for a run of 500 copies. When the boxes showed up, all the blues had turned into this gross muddy purple and the photos had this weird green tint. Turns out the designer exported everything in RGB and the shop's RIP converted it to CMYK in the worst way possible. I learned the hard way that you gotta request a hard proof before you pay for a full run. Has anyone else gotten burned by trusting a soft proof that looked nothing like the final print?
About 8 months ago a prepress guy at my local print shop called me out for using #000000 black on a brochure. He said it would look muddy and washed out once printed because the paper can't hold that density. I argued back saying black is black and he was just nitpicking. After he showed me a side by side comparison of pure black versus a rich dark gray I had to admit he was right. The difference in print was night and day with the dark gray looking way cleaner and more professional. Now I never use straight black for body text on anything going to print. Has anyone else gotten pushback from printers on small details like this? I feel like those guys see our worst mistakes every day.
I was just counting up the jobs from the last year and realized I've run over 500 plates through that old press without a single color mode screw-up. That felt pretty good considering I ruined my first 50 plates back in 2018 by forgetting to switch from RGB to CMYK. Has anyone else hit a milestone that surprised you after all the early mistakes?