Printing & Color
Order a sample kit to get your best color results.
4by6.com uses the best quality presses to print your cards. But even the best press in the world can't match what you see on your monitor or your printer at home. This is because of differences in the way light is carried to your eye (transmissive vs. reflective), ink color (your yellow isn't exactly the same as our yellow), paper stock and a number of other factors. Despite all the differences, with a little care we can reproduce your color within a few percentage points if you follow the two tips below.
Choose colors from the Pantone 4 Color Process Guidebook:
The Pantone 4 Color Process Guide is our color standard. By far the best way to guarantee your color accuracy is to chose your colors from the 4 Color Guide. If you are using Photoshop and want to check your images against the guide select a small area and use a Gaussian blur to even out the pixels before looking up the closest color you can find in the 4 Color Guide. This will give you a good sense of whether you're on the right track.
Calibrate your monitor to our printing:
If you haven't done so already, order a Sample Kit. Included in the Sample Kit is a color calibration card. You can download the source files below. Compare the color on the printed piece with the color of the file on your monitor when opened in Photoshop. Make adjustments from there. Most of the time you can get a good result just by adjusting the brightness and gamma for your ambient lighting conditions. Apple has a very nice calibration utility found in System Preference -> Displays -> Color tab. Click 'calibrate' and follow the directions. Most Windows graphics cards have a calibration utility with their drivers. They usually can be found in the control panel. Refer to your graphics card manual for help. This is just a brief overview of color calibration. If you need more information there is much more complete information on the internet then we can present here.
About ICC profiles:
Color profiles are not a magic panacea to make your colors right. Outside of a closed system (where all output devices are perfectly calibrated to single standard under known conditions) at best they can provide an approximation of what things will look like. We do not recommend using profiles to alter color on your monitor. Profiles are most useful to you when you print on your home printer. By using a standard SWOP2, or better yet GRACOL 7, profile you can approximate printing on a lithographic press.
Keep in mind that we are a gang run printer. We do our best to make every card that we print look as good as possible, but there will always be minor variations.
Download the calibration source files.
Use Pantone Guides for best results
We highly recomend that you use a Pantone Process Guidebook to select the colors for your design.