illustrator colors way ugly

[dude9er]

I have an epson c84 printer and am using Illustrator 10. My problem is I can't get the colors to print the way I see them on the screen. I have a specific color, even CMYK/RGB %code that I used in creating the design with a different computer. It was sent to the printers and printed exactly as I wanted. The client now wants me to do additional work using all the same concepts and color schemes. When I use the same %color codes on my computer (different from the original one I designed on) and try to print it out it looks horrible, not even close. I messed around with different color codes and printed them off and just can't get a match at all. Even changing from photoshop to illustrator everything looks horrid.

Anyone have anything they can hook me up with to get this straightened out? This is very stressful, and a waste of my whole day experimenting with no real results.

Thanks in advance.

[.soulty]

ok... this can be for many reasons, gamma on that particular computer makes you think the colours are different.

- maybe a different version of illustrator?

- have you consider using PMS colours (Pantone/SPOT colours)


If you could tell me what kind of job are you working on here i could help you a little further. does it include photoshop work and illustrator work (all vector or mixture of bitmap and vector?)?

[dude9er]

hey soulty, thanks for the feedback so far. I'm using bitmaps imported to illustrator,and then vector for text and borders. The bitmap is a monogram that uses the same color scheme as the borders. This proabbly doesn't help the situtation with color matching the vector to the bitmap. Ah well. I'll look at pantones and see what I can find. I'm just sending the work to be printed at Kinkos, so would you suggest using RGB or CMYK. Not needing to make plates or anything so perhaps the RGB would be better.

Thanks again.

[.soulty]

Ive always printed with CMYK in any situations (digital or litho).

Imported images into illustrator is sorta nasty sometimes, i used to work on this regularly and had most success with tif's which you should be exporting with CMYK if you are using CMYK in illustrator.

check the results at kinkos and get back to us.