Every creative team has lived this moment: a design looks flawless on screen, gets approved, goes to print….and comes back looking flat, shifted, or just wrong. The blues are muddier. The blacks aren't quite black. The distinctive asset of your ‘brand red’ is suddenly more of a rusty brick colour than the sleek red your customers and clients know and love.
At Healeys we see these issues land in real files, every week. With experts on hand, here’s access to a practical, no-nonsense Colour Accuracy checklist your studio can run before any file goes to print.
Exploring what made the critical list, and why each item matters, is how we help clients every day achieve their creative vision in print.
Speaking the right colour language is not something we expect to think about when we’re booking the next important print job in. Screens work in RGB; presses work in CMYK, and the conversion between the two isn't automatic guesswork. It's governed by ICC colour profiles, mapping the ‘colour language’ to a universal standard.
Files built or exported without the correct output profile (or with a generic default) are the single biggest cause comments such as "...it looked different on screen."
Our tailored Colour Accuracy checklist walks through which profile to request from your printer, where to embed it, and how to spot a missing or mismatched profile before it becomes a reprint.
Spot colours converted automatically to CMYK can drift significantly, especially in brand colours like deep blues, greens, and oranges that sit outside the CMYK gamut.
Our Colour Accuracy checklist covers when to keep a colour as a true spot ink, when a CMYK build is close enough, and how to ‘sanity-check’ a conversion before it's locked into a client-approved file.
Overprint settings determine whether one ink prints on top of another or knocks it out. A stray overprint toggle on black text (especially small text) or a background element can cause registration issues or unexpected colour mixing that only shows up on press. Another regular culprit is white text on coloured backgrounds, and with the wrong settings this can disappear.
In our Colour Accuracy checklist we cover the handful of places this setting hides and what to check before export.
A "black" built for a small line of body text needs a different ink recipe than a black used for a full-bleed background. Get it wrong and you'll see washed-out backgrounds or blacks so heavy they may not dry properly. The Colour Accuracy checklist gives the build ratios for text black vs. rich black, and where each belongs.
A screen proof and a physical press proof are answering different questions. The checklist sets out what to check at each proofing stage. This is the sign-off language that protects both your studio and your printer when all your stakeholders say ‘yes’.
The complete Colour Accuracy checklist with specs, profile settings, and a printable sign-off sheet, is available as a free download here.
Download the checklist and arrange a call back with our print experts today to see how Healeys can support your next print project.