Printing colour difference between workstations.

Hey folks,

Bit of a problem at the work place. We are currently printing out a large quantity of posters for a marketing push and the marketing department drafted in a few people from another dept. to help out. Problem is the when the second dept tries to print these posters the end result is much much darker and the colour is completely washed out.

I have reinstalled the network printer, defaulted all the settings and adjusted and boosted brightness and oclour settings - with no luck to getting anything near to what the marketing dept is getting.

The file is a pdf format and fairly chunky on spooling. Can link people up to the file if necessary.

Thanks,

Are the marketing guys printing to the same queue? If you make the settings for the printer the same as what Marketing have it should in theory look the same... I assume they're using the same physical printing device?

yeap on both accounts

same queue and same physical printer...this is what's really bugging me.

HOWEVER

Marketing is using Adobe Acrobat Standard (pdf creator/reader) to open and print and the other dept are using Adobe Reader...could this be the problem? If so how excatly do you tell Reader to sit up straight and stop pratting around?

Hrmmm - you're certain all the colour settings are the same? What printer model?

It's more likely to be the difference in software tbh. If the printer is producing the nice copy from the marketing dept then it's not going to be the printer, as the only difference is the device sending the job to it. Also, make sure the DEFAULT settings on the other department's print queue are the same as the marketing ones - just because the computers are pointing at the same print queue, doesn't mean the defualts will be the same. The print server will have just installed the driver onto the client machine with it's out of the box settings - which are stored locally. So set them up the same and see what happens then. (apologies if you've done that already and I teaching you to suck eggs ;))

Sounds like you dont have the colour profiles installed ?

start -> settings -> Printers -> right click, properties -> colour management tab -> Are they set the same ?

If they are set to auto - make sure they have auto selected the same one. If they are different, click manual and make sure they match.

Are the people using the same monitors, as it could be the colour gamut (red green and blue). Make sure that in the colour management on properties on the desktop. ie using the same profile. as screen is not always wsiwig (what you see is what you get). Because the monitor might be using rgb and the printer might be using cymk (cyan yellow magenta black) and to make brown up (128, 80 50) the differences in the red green and brown spectrum.

It gets a bit more complicated than this. But ensure that all settings are the same on printer and on the computer. Also, the hue of the monitor can have an effect of what is displayed on the screen. Also, lighting, sunlight shades can also have an effect.

Just something to ponder on.:mrgreen: