A print shop owner told me my blues were all wrong and I fixed them in 10 minutes

I used to just use default CMYK values for dark blues and they always came out muddy or purple-ish on real prints. A guy who runs a small print shop near me looked at one of my test prints and said straight up "your cyan is too weak and your black is too heavy." He showed me on the spot that I needed to drop the K channel to about 15 percent and bump the cyan up to 100 while adding just a touch of magenta at 20 percent. I tried his numbers on a batch of 50 business cards and the difference was night and day, sharp deep blue that actually matched my screen pretty close. Has anyone else gotten solid feedback from a printer that changed how you set up your color values?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscarwilliams1d ago

That whole thing about "default CMYK values from design software are almost never right" applies to most preset settings in life honestly.

blaker751d ago

That's a good tip about the K channel but your numbers might not work across different printers... 15% black with 100 cyan and 20 magenta is a specific recipe for coated stock with an Epson or something similar. Uncoated paper will soak up that much ink and turn into a mess, you'd need to back off the cyan to maybe 80 and drop that magenta a bit too. Also depends on whether you're using an RGB workflow or converting from a specific color profile... I've had printers yell at me for not embedding the right ICC profile and then blaming my blues. The bigger point is that default CMYK values from design software are almost never right for actual printing, they're just generic conversions that don't account for paper type or ink density curves. Good on you for actually listening to a real printer instead of just tweaking things on screen.