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A printer in Chicago told me my greens were always muddy because I was mixing too much yellow
He said to cut the yellow by 15% in the CMYK breakdown and now my forest scenes actually look deep instead of sickly, anyone else had to unlearn a basic color rule like that?
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the_ray3d ago
Yeah, I learned this the hard way doing a big batch of product catalogs with a lot of foliage in the background. Spent days making those greens look rich on my monitor and the first print run came back looking like pea soup. The printer told me the same thing, back off the yellow by about 12-15% and it fixed everything instantly. It's one of those things where your eyes trick you into thinking more yellow makes it look alive when really it just turns everything muddy. You gotta trust the CMYK math over what you think looks good on screen. Also watch your black levels in those dark green areas, too much black and they go dead flat instead of having any depth.
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wren3014d ago
Huh, that's actually pretty standard advice but people miss it all the time. The thing nobody talks about is how much your monitor calibration changes your idea of what "right" looks like. You spend weeks tweaking a color on screen and then the print comes out looking like swamp water because your screen was lying to you the whole time. Also, paper stock matters way more than people give it credit for. Coated paper makes greens pop, uncoated paper eats all the yellow and turns everything mossy.
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