With my son we had this fun project os creating a card deck. When we finished I tried printing them (I don’t normally print these types of works) and realized the output from our Color LaserJet is extremely dark and muddy.
I understand this may be from the CMYK printing but I thought these printers had sRGB 2.1 and the adjustments would be done automatically.
Since they aren’t, what are my options? Is it possible to modify when exporting to PNG (I’m printing PNGs rather than from Acorn because I’ll need to share these as standalone image files).
Is it possible to add a layer whose blending mode tweaks the colors so they don’t become a muddy mess? It’s particularly noticeable in darker colors of course.
I’m adding three examples below. I’m taking pictures of the printed pages but pasting the PNGs for them as exported by Acorn.
(There are other issues like readability that I can address on my own since they’re plain bad layout as cards were thought out to be bigger initially)
The first thing I would try is to export your image as a TIFF, with Generic CMYK as the color profile.
Then I would open that up in Preview and print from there. (Acorn will convert the image back to RGB on open).
You might also check and see if your printer installed a custom profile for you to use in the color profile list when exporting. You could possibly get better results printing from Preview with that selected. (Sorry, but I don’t have this particular printer).
Thanks! I will try this. I can’t print directly to the printer, which is why I was exporting to PNG (and why I don’t print from Acorn).
To be fair, I don’t think it’s strictly related to my printer set-up and probably more related to my process itself. I was trying to compensate in the image for how the printer behaves (it’s a non professional CMYK Laser printer, to be clear).
Thanks anyway. I’ll keep trying I was hoping I had hit a common mistake and there was a common response to it. Should I be so lucky
Thanks for the clarification, my brain got stuck on the CMYK bit and looked for a solution that way.
I don’t think there’s a way to compensate for it before saving to a PNG. There’s probably some sort of “match colors to profile” or some switch somewhere on the printer side that needs to be turned on. I hope you find a solution without wasting too much ink!
I was hoping I had hit a common mistake and there was a common response to it. Should I be so lucky 