I have been doing a lot of printing this week in preparation for my portfolio, and I have been paying particular attention to colour correction throughout this printing process.This is the blue labels I have been making for a packaging assignment. I blue colour I used for the brand is a beautiful grey blue, it looks like a frosted sort of pale blue colour and it works really well for the iceblock package.
I had already printed half of the label out on plain paper, but I need to print one section out on sticker paper to use for the front. The paper isn't cheap and I was so disappointed when my first print (above) produced a completely different colour than my first print out!
The blue is so plain you can hardly read the label and it looks so different you'd think I had completely forgotten about the colour choices at all!
To fix the problem I had to do some blue swatch test prints on the sticker stock, and eventually I found that the bright, deeper blue printed out a similar colour to the plain paper.The top image above is the original file I used on plain paper and below is the new blue I had to use to print on the sticker paper. It looks really really disgusting, but have a look at the results....
Yay! The two blues on the different stocks are almost identical. This process took a while but it showed me how important colour is and how much it can vary between paper stocks. If I had been lazy and just settled on the first outcome, my branding would have suffered and the colour would have been inconsistent.
