Printing from the RGB to CMYK

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COPYCAT

I work in a digital printing facility with a HP Designjet 5500ps printer
which is set up CMYK. Powerpoint is set to RGB. We find that when we send a
very blue background slide for making a poster the blue turns to PURPLE! Even
if we save as a PDF that turns to purple.

Does anyone know how to get around this terrible problem we are having. We
have had customers reject the poster since it does not look like the file
they sent. I can't blame them. We have been printing out various boxes of
shades of just blue (all come out various shades of purple) then add green.
Once the green is added, the color is blue and depending on the percentages,
lighter or darker. This is nuts, we can not tell people to make these odd
changes to their slides because powerpoint won't talk to our CMYK printer.

IS THERE ANY WAY TO CHANGE POWERPOINT TO CMYK?????
 
=?Utf-8?B?Q09QWUNBVA==?= said:
I work in a digital printing facility with a HP Designjet 5500ps
printer which is set up CMYK. Powerpoint is set to RGB. We find that
when we send a very blue background slide for making a poster the blue
turns to PURPLE! Even if we save as a PDF that turns to purple.

Does anyone know how to get around this terrible problem we are
having. We have had customers reject the poster since it does not look
like the file they sent. I can't blame them. We have been printing out
various boxes of shades of just blue (all come out various shades of
purple) then add green. Once the green is added, the color is blue and
depending on the percentages, lighter or darker. This is nuts, we can
not tell people to make these odd changes to their slides because
powerpoint won't talk to our CMYK printer.

IS THERE ANY WAY TO CHANGE POWERPOINT TO CMYK?????
Click to expand...

This is really not a problem with Powerpoint, as RGB is RGB no matter
what application it comes from. PPT is very standard obeying in its usage
of colot. And tt would be a wrong strategy to change the colors in the
file because the same adjustment can be done during printing. After all,
PPT files are mostly for displaying and as your printer is clearly
capable of printing blue, there is no reason not to make blue print
blue...

This kind of a color conversion mismatch will happen because the settings
for changing the color profile during printing is not optimal. Blue has
traditionally been a difficult color to print, and one needs sometimes to
figure out a strategy to get best results. This is how you do it with
most printers:

In your printer's control panel find the settings for Color Management.

There should be a setting for the "intent" of color conversion. That may
be "absolute colorimetric", "perpectual", "relative colorimetric" or even
"business graphics". This is the critical setting and it can freely be
changed case by case when you need to.

If is not the last one, try that, if it is available in your driver
(perhaps it is called something else). But ff the value of the setting
already is the last one, try changing it to "perceptual". And then the
rest... but at least "absolute colorimetric" really should produce crap.
 
Thanks Matti, I will give this a try. There is nothing like someone giving us
a poster setup with a blue sky with fluffy clouds background that turns out
purple! I'll let you know how we do on that!
 
Matti, went in and tried what you said to do. They had Productivity (we had
it set at that) then max quality and max quality-enhanced IQ. Tried them all,
no difference. I even went into the properties of the printer and changed the
printer color profile to sRGB as Powerpoint is, NADA!

One thing you said I must disagree with, RGB can output different colors on
different printers, due probably to the print drivers or color profile.
Thankfully the poster I was printing yesterday had a solid background and I
was able to create a color box and insert in the background. Of course, the
two graphs had the same background and I had to change them also. The poster
printed great and it is a real blue. We shouldn't have to do this though. I
think I will contact both Microsoft and HP to get a more workable solution.
Seems we did not have this problem with the old versions of Office products.

Oh, and I went into Publisher, there is a CMYK option in there. WHY NOT
POWERPOINT!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks and keep the suggestions coming please!!!
 
Publisher is a tool to create *printed* documents -- thus a CMYK option
(taking your word for it -- I didn't check). PowerPoint is a *presentation*
tool designed for projecting...thus RGB (in other words, PowerPoint was not
designed for print).
 
Yikes, do they not know that folks put together huge display posters in
Powerpoint, especially on campuses and such because that is a creative
program they have built into their computers. The majority I ask say they do
not have Publisher since that has to be bought seperate. The thing is,
although blue is tricky at best, I have only noticed this problem with the
new version of Powerpoint. We have been making large (up to 42" wide or tall
in landscape paper and widest we've made is 8 foot) posters for about 10
years now and only recently have had the problem with blue showing as purple.
Whatever happened to WYSIWYG??? I know that was way back in the dinosaur age,
but things should improve with time, not be less workable!
 
PowerPoint, Excel and Word (and Publisher) by default emit color in RGB only. That means any CMYK images imported into these apps are "massaged" by the respective program. They all use sRGB as the source color space.

That said, RIPs I'm familiar with can be configured to preserve "blue" by choosing "None" for the source RGB profile. You may want to give that a try.
 
Hi,

I recommend printing the slide as a .pdf--from there you should be able to pick settings which will print in CMYK only (for example, I selected "Press Quality" default settings, and it automatically converts to CMYK at 2400 dpi).
 
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