Hit 97% color match on a tricky olive green after 8 tries

I was printing a batch of shirts for a friend's landscaping company out in Austin, and that olive green just would not come out right. After 7 failed prints and a lot of wasted ink, I finally hit 97% match by swapping my cyan to a 22% value instead of 18%. Anyone else found a weird little number tweak that fixed a color for you?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_piper12d ago

Ha! Yes! I had the same thing with a forest green last month. Dropping magenta 3% fixed it instantly.

theabennett13d ago

Oh wow, that is a great catch. I actually read somewhere that small shifts in cyan can make or break an olive green because it interacts so differently with yellow bases. I had a similar headache matching a sage green for a client last year, and after way too many test prints, I found that dropping my yellow by just 4% did the trick. It is wild how a single digit change can be the difference between a muddy mess and a spot-on match. Your 22% cyan fix makes perfect sense since lower cyan values often look washed out with certain greens. I have heard other printers say they keep notes on these little tweaks for future jobs because they are so easy to forget.