Recently purchased C5185

[jd159]

Hi,

New to printing. Bought something that is relatively commercial level to do some low volume short run in house marketing for my business. I am working in adobe illlustrator to design my prints. Before I start wasting paper, time and money, I've opted to post in a forum first and see if the internet brain trust can help me out.

To get optimum print quality, what color settings should I be using? I've googled the heck out of this but can't find anything conclusive. Working space RGB or cymk? Some say CYMK 100% and others say RGB and convert. Should I be using illustrator to choose the color profiles and set the machine to have no preference? Any advice on some solid reading material to learn this stuff would be great.

 

[xfactor printing]

If it has a fiery rip download and use the fiery color profiles.

Working in CMYK gives you more control of exactly what color something will print. Some RGB colors can't be printed, and so by converting to CMYK you can control what look you get, which way you shift the color to attain the best qualities within the printable color space.

Working in RGB gives you slightly smaller file sizes and maintains the wider color gamut in the original document, and usually gives decent results. You can always convert one or two photographs to CMYK that don't translate the way you want based on the first proof print.

 

[jd159]

No fiery...yet. It is an option I may consider getting depending on how much volume I end up doing. It has around 40k prints on it. How is the 5185 for this type of application? Basic marketing material printed on glossy cover.

Thanks for the tips for rgb. I think my workspace will be in rgb, and i'll rasterize any photos in photoshop, maybe in cymk, and insert them into my illustrator document.

I'll be saving the files as a pdf, but not according to the x2003 standard because correct me if i'm wrong, that converts all to cymk.

As for print settings, anything I should know of that is considered a rule of thumb? Conserve cymk primaries, print as image, grayscale etc.

 

[xfactor printing]

I'd work with vector objects as cmyk - better control and no downside that I know of.

RIP may do a better job of rgb to cmyk conversion than network printing card; I don't know to be honest as I've always had a rip.

For the rgb to cmyk conversion you can choose either relative colormetric or perceptual. I'm accustomed to relative colormetric but many prefer preceptual. Do some tests and see for yourself how each works with the material you are printing. (and then even after you choose the workflow you want, you know how it works for when you have to do something different for one or two troublesome photos.)