That time a trade show booth had neon oranges looking brown in print

I was at a design expo in Chicago last fall and saw a booth where the neon orange graphics on screen looked completely muddy brown in their printed banners. Turned out they used RGB values for the print files and nobody caught it until the booth arrived. How do you guys check your neon colors before sending them to print?

2 comments

2 Comments

wren3014d ago

Read an interview with a printer who said neon colors in RGB are basically impossible to get right in CMYK. He suggested using spot colors for anything that bright, something like Pantone Neon Orange. That or you gotta get a physical swatch book and hold it next to your screen to see how close you can get. Your eyes will trick you just looking at it on a monitor.

mark_fisher484d ago

Notice this same disconnect happens everywhere not just printing - think about how different your Spotify playlist sounds in your car vs. earbuds vs a cheap Bluetooth speaker. The whole RGB to CMYK thing is just one more example of how the tools we use to make stuff never match the way we actually experience it in real life. It's honestly wild that we're still dealing with this conversion gap in 2024 like there isn't some better way to bridge digital and physical colors.