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Rant: Printed 500 flyers at FedEx Office and they came out looking like muddy soup
I designed this flyer for a garage sale in Denver and on my monitor the bright yellow background popped so nice. Took the USB drive to FedEx Office downtown and the guy ran 500 copies before I checked. The yellow turned into this gross brownish green and the blue text blended right in. None of the vibrant colors I picked showed up at all. I stood there watching him print the whole batch and felt sick. The manager offered to reprint but said I should have converted to CMYK myself first. I spent 3 hours at home recalibrating my screen after that disaster. Has anyone else had a print shop just run with your RGB file without warning you?
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wendysmith5d ago
Wait, are you sure he said you should have converted to CMYK yourself? Most print shops worth their salt will warn you if your file's in the wrong color space before they run a big batch like that. They usually have a pop-up or a guy who checks it real quick, so that manager was probably just covering for his printer jockey messing up.
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wendy_clark5d ago
Hang on, is nobody gonna mention the real issue here? @wendysmith, you're totally right that they probably have a guy who checks files, but what if the file had a mix of RGB and CMYK elements? Most designers don't realize that even if your document is set to CMYK, any placed images or spot colors that are still RGB will screw up the whole thing. That manager might've been covering for the printer, sure, but the designer could've also just never bothered to check the color space on each individual element before sending it over.
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