Help with rack card: Dark Blues look purple when printed

[dagmp]

Hello, I made a design for a 4" x 9" rack card that I made using gimp and a lot of ms paint because I don't know how to use gimp very well. I printed it on my color laser and some of the dark blues look purple.

Namely:
  Really purple is the text in the blue box with the green border

  And the background square behind "compassionate carnivore"

? Is this just my printer?

? Would it be fine at a professional printer?

? Does gimp have an easy way to deal with this?

I think I'll go purchase a couple of flyers using these images at a local printer.

And if anyone has any suggestions to make this rack card better. I would appreciate them. I just noticed I spelled theater wrong.

   

   

[Ofnuts]

No hint of purple in what you show. If you use the pointer dialog to check the pixels the green channel is more important than the red, so you are bit cyan and certainly not purple. So probably the printer, or a mismatch between your display and the printer. Making sure everything is fine is called color management (with color calibration). On the other hand laser printers aren't very good at color fidelity anyway.

Side A is very blurry.

Both sides are very messy, I hardly understand what the whole subject is.

[rich2005]

Apart from color calibrated display, which I am guessing you do not have, the general advice is.

Some RGB colors that you can see on your monitor (in particular, blue, green and all bright vibrant colors) cannot be printed and/or replicated with standard CMYK inks. Keep in mind that, when creating a file for print, you should always make the original file in CMYK color mode before starting to work on it."

Using Gimp for "soft proofing" - showing what the print might look like - and truthfully Gimp is not so good. Gimp is set up like this. This using a generic CMYK icc profile. A professional printer will use one according to paper & inks.

   

The show out of gamut option tells you what colors will not print correctly, All those blues for example. You can sometimes tweak the color curves to lose the out of gamut color but in this case probably accept the change.

   

For your next project use Krita where you can start and finish in CMYK mode.

[dagmp]

thanks guys for the information, especially on profiles on profiles and krita. It's probably just my printer, because i just noticed my purples seem a little more red than purple. And it said that's common if it's low.

[sallyanne]

I didn't see it in the previous answers but to add to what has already been said. Is your ink running low?