Color accurate printing problems


southparkken
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Hello. I've always used AutoCad on a PC for many many years. I've switched to a suped up iMac 27" and now using Chief Architect.

I have a printing and prepress background as well as Architecture yet I am not able to figure out why my plans print out and the colors are crappy, dark and drab-- nothing like what i see on my monitor.

 

My iMac is calibrated for color accuracy, yet there is NO place in Chief architect to either set up a Print Preset or choose a paper profile when you go to print. Photoshop has these abilities-- am I missing something in CArchitect ?? I can't give anything I am printing out to clients--it looks unacceptable to me.

 

I have a brand new Epson P800 17x22 printer and the only way to print out a drawing that looks nice is to export from CA and open in Photoshop, color correct, choose my paper profile in my Printing preset and then it looks good. But, why should i have to do this?

 

Any thoughts? Any ideas? Any help would be appreciated if someone else has figured this out, or please tell me what I am doing wrong!

 

Help!

Thanks-- to anyone who rseponds!

KH

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First things first...

 

HOW exactly are you printing?  Can you spell out the process you're using? 

 

Are you printing directly from plan or from layout? 

 

Are you just printing, printing image, or printing to PDF?

 

Have you checked the drawing sheet setup dbx?

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There is a quick fix.  If there are a lot of dark materials and you do not want to add lights you can go to the 3d defaults and increase the ambient setting.  It will look a little brighter on your monitor but a LOT brighter on a print.  I think the color will stay accurate.  It sounds like a luminance problem.

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Thanks to both of you for responding. I found the button in the print dialogue box to choose the profiles I need to use for my different papers-- I am new to CA, only had it a few days actually, so please excuse my stupidness. I have successfully printed a few layouts on both of the Epson papers I am using and the images look pretty nice.

 

I do believe that it is partially a luminance problem as you said-- I will try that tip today to see if i get a Brighter result.

 

One thing that I still cant figure out, however, is when I do a Ray trace rendering-- it is turning the background of the paper gray when it finishes?? Is this normal? or how can I make it stay white? Where is the magic button to turn off the gray?

 

I am getting used to the program now, it's a lot like AutoCAD on PC --which helps with my learning curve, but So much better in some ways! and on a Mac!!! Yeah Apple!

 

Thanks to both of you for responding!

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FYI --  And, just in case anyone else is starting new to CA and setting up a brand new Mac and large printer....you do have to install the Epson paper profiles into the Colorsync folder in your system folder. The printer driver for the large format Epsons only has a few basic papers with it in its canned installation-- all the others you can download from Epson and put in your ColorSync folder. There are two colorsync folders, make sure you put them in the correct folder.

 

Cheers!

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