hey guys :)

just bought a new laser color printer and having a pain of a time to get it to print the blues the same as on the screen.
default settings made it darker blue (trying to print light blue came out royal), i tried different settings, i went into windows icm and associated the printer profile with the monitor and then it came out purple!!

any pointers?

cheers :)

If you're using adobe photoshop it has a colour calibration tool in it (look in the help).

This will allow you to calibrate your monitor for print use. It's never exact but you can probably get pretty close.

The other thing if you're designing for print, is to check the CMYK preview regularly and check for out of gamut colours. The colour spectrum in rgb (on a monitor) is much wider than that available with CMYK. If you do a google search for 'colour gamut', 'cmyk rgb color space' you should find some information that'll explain those concepts in more depth and how to deal with the issue.

Blues are particularly tricky because you can have a highly saturated blue on screen, but it'll be impossible to achieve the exact same colour using cmyk as you're dealing with a different colour system and reflected as opposed to emitted light.

If you preview your image as cmyk in photoshop before sending it to print it should give you a better idea of how it's going to come out and if you use the gamut warning option (in the view menu) it will point to colours which you have on screen that fall outside the cmyk colour space.

What sort of image are you trying to print, and from what application?

This is where windows has never caught up to the mac.

There is simply no good OS-Wide colour matching/monitor calibrating in windows. I think adobe made some software, but it's application specific (more apps don't support it)

(something like http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/colorsync/)

Best solution is to see if you can borrow a mac to do any print jobs you have, or try the adobe tools (less configurable, however)

it's only a word document that i'm trying to print, I will run photoshop see if that makes any difference, cheers :)
i do have a powerbook from which i do my brochures and such in quark but my staff use the pcs for printing off standard word docs for their classes (i run a language school)

Is it an image in word that's part of the document, or just the text colour?

it's the text color on this particular document, it does have a small image but no blues in it, and it's fine, maybe slightly darker but negligible

You could try opening up photoshop, create a new blank document in CMYK colour mode. Then choose a CMYK safe colour from the pallette (if you look in the photoshop help explaining the little icons that appear in the colour choosing palette that will show you how to do that).

Choose a CMYK safe colour that's as close to the shade of blue that you want, but also note the rgb colour values for it.

Then in word, select your text and select the colour, and enter the RGB values that you noted from photoshop.

With many desktop printers, although they actually print in CMYK the data that the printer driver receives (this might particularly be the case from word) is often expected to be in RGB format. The driver will then usually do the colour conversion itself from rgb to cmyk before printing.

By selecting an RGB value that's within (or very close to) the CMYK colour space, hopefully when the driver does it's conversion it'll convert that rgb value to the correct shade that you've chosen (when in photoshop) so your output will more or less match what you have on screen.

I'm not completely sure if that'll work but it might be worth a try.

If that doesn't work you could try choosing a different shade of blue directly within word and reducing the red in it a little (if your print is coming out purple reducing the red might help with that a bit).

Let me know how you get on. Good luck.

cheers, i'll give it a crack :)