Printed 500 flyers in RGB and wondered why they looked like garbage

I was making flyers for a local band show in Denver last month. Designed everything on my monitor, it looked amazing. Bright neon greens and purples. Sent it to the print shop and they came back looking muddy and dark. I had no idea about color modes back then. The print guy actually called me and asked if I knew what I was doing. Felt real dumb. Has anyone else had a print job get ruined because of this?

2 comments

2 Comments

elliot_harris259d agoMost Upvoted

Oh come on, it's really not that deep. You can argue about industry standards all you want, but you still gotta know the basic rules before you break em.

alicebarnes9d ago

Asked if I knew what I was doing" lol, okay but maybe the print shop was right to question you. Here's the thing - you're acting like RGB is some rookie mistake but CMYK actually crushes all the vibrancy out of your designs. Why are we pretending that's a good thing? I've sent RGB files to multiple print shops and they come back looking exactly like what I designed when they bother to calibrate their machines properly. That neon green you wanted? CMYK literally cannot reproduce it, so maybe the printing industry should fix their broken system instead of making us guess which shade of mud their machine will spit out.