Inkjet Color Conundrum

Problems arise when there’s a mixture of design programs that don’t sync: For example, Adobe Photoshop using SWOP, Adobe Illustrator using GRACoL, Adobe InDesign using something else. The downfall is a mixed bag of elements that needs to be converted multiple times.

“If they are editing an image on their monitor, most designers do not keep up with maintaining their color calibration,” Schilling contends. “They go by a visual color correction; they don’t know how to go by the numbers. When they’re converted to the output color space, they’re not the colors that they expect. They’re coloring with one set of crayons and the printer is using a different set of crayons.”