New To Quark - Colour Issues - What's Up With Yellow?

[handleodhran]

I'm new to this design game but have managed ok in the last 6 months. I sell ads to local businesses on behalf of local sports clubs and design them myself. You can see the results on

http://www.clubprint.ie.

A friend of mine showed me the basics and put a template together for me. Most people aren't too picky when it comes to colours - they're happy to be supporting the club. When they are picky, I run into problems. I see other threads where Colour Management is mentioned. I create a poster in Quark Xpress 6.1 and then export the whole job to PDF, using the RGB Output Option. My big issue is how the get the colours correct. At the moment I can't for the life of me, replicate yellow. I keep getting green. I've used a CMYK, RGB and HSB version of yellow. The guy who wants the ad, is insistent that the background is yellow. I also notice problems with producing red. If I'm in Edit > Preferences > Display, I'm using 24 bit colour. For each of the boards I produce, I design 29 ads. I'd like to have a template which I can use, which will give me the correct colours each time. Does anyone know how I can achieve this?

 

[apepp]

...out of interest, how does photoshop print, any different from quark or acrobat?

andrew

 

[handleodhran]

I opened the PDF file in Photoshop yesterday and printed it out - it was the exact same.

 

[apepp]

...right, would also be worth checking your printer driver is compatible with your operating system...

...try this link, if not done so already...

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/famiDocument?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=14438&docname=bpd09126

andrew

 

[handleodhran]

It all seems compatible - I've also downloaded the latest driver for the Printer but there's no difference to the printouts. Am I doomed?

 

[apepp]

...everything is now pointing to fault with your printer, so far you have done all the right measures to eliminate any possible causes from a software point of view, such as printing from an rgb pdf...

...do bear in mind that printing to a desktop printer will require your images in rgb and not cmyk, tif files preferably, this will mean choosing the composite rgb option from quark, if quark detects eps images it won't convert those to rgb if cmyk, a cmyk tif will be converted. eps bitmaps are independant or self contained and quark cannot convert these...

...also if you have quark elements i.e. cmyk colored text or boxes etc, those elements will be converted to rgb when choosing composite rgb in the print options...

...with just this composite rgb option and no color management active you ought to be ok, to really help quark out when converting cmyk to rgb using the composite rgb print option, then the quark cms preference needs to active with correct profiles...

...as you have seemingly experimented with the cms interface to no effect from quark using rgb source images then your printer is in my view the cause of the problems...

...is this an old printer or in warranty? i would be inclined at this stage to get it serviced or if a little pricey to do this, consider purchasing a new printer...

...in the mean time i think your friends printer will need to be a substitute...

...i wish you all the best...

...i truly understand your frustrations too....

andrew

 

[handleodhran]

Cheers for the help Andrew. Brought my laptop down to the local Cartridge World and hooked up to one of their printers. Printed out fine - so yep, the problem was with my printer.