Color Proofing for Long-Distance/Internet Digital

[poiesthesis]

I ran into a little question while finally dragging my first longer book over the finish line. I’m going to be having it printed and bound long distance in Illinois and then shipped over (I’m in Seattle). It’s a short enough run that the cover is going to be printed 4/0, digital CMYK process (innards are black/0).

My own experience with digital color printing is usually short runs, in-person. It involves me hanging out at whatever copy shop I’m using, running some test prints to figure out the quirks of the machine, and shifting white balance etc. to compensate for however screwy the calibration seems to be (sometimes I’ll even print a little swatch sheet when I’m narrowing in on a color). But these experiences have generally taught me that digital color is somewhat of a gamble, and I'm mildly concerned about gambling at the scale of a full book printing. Normally I'd be pretty okay with a cross-your-fingers kind of moment, but the cover is flooded a solid, slightly warm grey (which, from copier woes of yore, seems to be the trickiest mark to hit), and a previous printing of just a few copies from a local printer (whose quote came in too high for the longer run) dumped everything neatly into the cyan end of the spectrum.

So, the question: How do you go about proofing digital CMYK with an unknown printer? Is going back and forth on multiple hard proofs a horrible thing to do as a client, or just part of the process? Can you ask for a test/swatch sheet to be printed? Are there standards that the larger printers are held to? How do you work with those standards? Have you found a way to proof in-house, reliably, before sending something digital out?

(Also, once I make it through this first printing, I'll post about this printer in the internet printing thread, they seem pretty great.)

[marcfischer]

Have you asked if if they will send you a hardcopy proof before they run the whole job? Usually this is kind of expensive but if it's an expensive job, it might be worth it.

[poiesthesis]

Yes! The printer we're using does separate proofing of the cover vs. innards, so the quote we have includes a hard proof of the cover (we are not proofing the interior). I'm just trying to figure out if there's anything I can do beforehand, to try and get the best result from the proof—and if the proof goes south, sort of what to expect from that back and forth.

[marcfischer]

I can't remember where I've heard or read this, but I do think that colored greys can be tricky to reproduce accurately. I know the one or two times I've gone for a solid grey tone that was specific and had various colors mixed into it, I wasn't happy with the result and it was much more purple than expected.

If you do a search for printing color guides, some printing services will offer CMYK combos that work well. Here is one:

https://www.printninja.com/printing-res ... ted-values

Gotprint.com has a good suggestion like this for how to get a much richer black than just making the K value 100 and making CMY set to 0.