Warning: I spent $400 on a custom color palette that looked awful in print

I paid a designer online to make a palette for my bakery's new flyers, and it looked great on my screen. When the first 500 copies got printed, all the nice pastel pinks and yellows turned out muddy and dull. The printer in town said the colors were way outside the CMYK gamut from the start. Has anyone else had a print job ruined by bad color mode conversion?

2 comments

2 Comments

danielm158h ago

Watched a friend launch a line of t-shirts with a killer neon green logo online. The first batch came out looking like baby puke because the shop just auto-converted his RGB file. He had to eat the whole cost and start over, this time sending the printer the right files from the jump. It's such a common and expensive mistake, that screen-to-print gut punch is the worst. Really makes you double-check everything is in CMYK before you even think about sending a file out.

the_gray2h ago

My first freelance gig back in 2012 had the same problem, danielm15. Client wanted a bright orange for their cafe menus. I sent the RGB file like an idiot. The printed menus looked like a faded, muddy peach. They were not happy. I spent my whole fee on a reprint just to save the relationship. Now I have a sticky note on my monitor that just says "CMYK, you fool." It's a lesson you only need to learn once, but it costs you.