Color prints that aren't so saturated

[gotphish001]

For final construction sets we print grey scale. For design development we print in color because it's much easier for clients to understand and visualize the drawings. It's also easier for me to pick out errors that need fixed. Some fills just crush ink though. Like if I make kitchen cabinets a cherry wood color, the print is almost wet with color. I tried using less dpi, but way before the colors get to the point that the paper isn't saturated the drawings look like garbage. Is there a solution to this problem? More importantly is there a fix that doesn't come from me changing every single color or surface? The colors could be almost a dot matrix look as long as I could make anything black print solid. There are the built in 25%, 50%, 75% grey scale fills. If I could make all my color fills and surfaces look like the 25% or even 50% grey fill that would be amazing. Is there a way to do that?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Control of color saturation overall is not something that is part of ARCHICAD - it will print (send to printer driver - or PDF) the color values you specify as pen colors, images, or algorithmic shaders. (There is some control of saturation in the rendering engine - but your question is about fills, etc too - so that won't give you what you're asking for.)

You can make a new pen table by duplicating an existing color print pen table and go through it and desaturate every pen... (Double click the pen color in the new table to adjust... and be sure to save the modified table.) This will only address fills, not any surface textures (generated from image files)... But, you can keep your blacks pure black as desired.

If your printer driver has a color setting panel in the print dialog, you can go there and adjust sliders to desaturate the output while keeping high DPI... You might have individual CMYK (or more) sliders ... or an overall saturation slider in the manufacturer's driver dialog.

Or, you can publish your output to a PDF file, and then open the PDF in Photoshop or some other image processing program and desaturate there. (If the goal is to lower the contrast and saturation of all colors but keep black black, then change to CMYK working color space and change only the curves for the CMY inks.).

[Karl Ottenstein]

The easiest solution, if your printer driver doesn't have a saturation slider... is if you happen to be on a Mac?

MacOS's build-in Preview app let's you open a PDF and export it with adjustments made by a so-called "Quartz Filter". You can create your own Quartz Filters using the built-in ColorSync Utility. See attached screenshot showing creation of a new desaturation filter...

Once created, just open PDF, export, print exported PDF.

[Anonymous]

Are you using the correct paper for your printer? Are you setting up the paper selection correct on the print driver? Are you using the correct colour calibration profile for your printer and paper?

The issue of colour printing, colour accuracy, image quality etc is the subject of dozens of books and thousands of articles on the internet.

From your description I would suggest you are trying to print to bond paper which is not suitable for high saturation printing, you really need to use specialty coated papers for this type of printing

[Erwin Edel]

For our Canon large format printer setting it to 'economy' mode printing (as in saving ink) turns everything into a more pleasing reduced saturation. It saves ink, it prints faster, it looks nice on draft paper.

Maybe find the similar setting on your printer.

[gotphish001]

Lots of things to try out. I'll check them all out.

I don't think it's the type of paper. It prints great. I just don't need it to print so saturated as mentioned in the other posts. I like the color for showing clients, but I don't need to use so much ink each time I make a little change and print new sheets for a client to see.

Not sure if I mentioned but this is mostly for kitchen elevations. Kitchen cabinets seem to crush ink because they are ridiculously saturated. If a client changes a door cabinet to say a drawer cabinet and I print the sheet again so they can see what it looks like, I feel like I'm just throwing ink away on these kinds of changes.

I'm on a PC but we have 2 out of 3 workstations in our office as mac. I'll check the mac solution as the last option. I'm only on a PC because I just bought it. Lose too much money to switch to mac at this point. Next upgrade I'll switch since I'm at an archicad job now.

[Lingwisyer]

Paper types handle inks differently which will result in different saturation levels with the same output and prints settings.



Ling.