Expert: Ran - 1/23/2010

Question
I HAVE DESIGNED A FLYER IN COREL DRAW.
IMPORTED HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES. POWERCLIPPED THEM.
CREATED A PDF FILE.SENT TO THE PRINTER.HE SENT ME THE PROOF BACK.
IN THE PROOF PICTURES ARE FADED.
HOW CAN I FIX THIS,
THANK YOU.
ATHER

Answer
It sounds like you this might be your first experience of the CMYK limited gamut range.

Monitors emit light, paper only reflects light. So monitors can show much more vivid colours than ink on paper. When the printer provides a proof he will convert all your glorious RGB (monitor) colours into the closest CMYK (ink) colours that he can, so your proof will be closer to what the final output will look like.

So to answer your question - There is no way to "fix" this. But you can avoid nasty surprises by working in CMYK in the first place. When you import your images, click Bitmap/Convert to Bitmap and choose CMYK colour. You should also be working in the CMYK settings in your colour dialogs such as Uniform Fill and Outline Pen. (You don't *have* to, but what you see will be closer to what you're going to get back from the print shop).

Also there are options in the .pdf output dialog tabs to convert all colours to CMYK in the .pdf. Then at least the .pdf should give you an indication of what your output is gonna look like.

You might try Hex printing (Hexachrome). Instead of CMYK they use an additional two colours in the mix, light Cyan and light Magenta. This increases the overall colour gamut and can give impressive results, with particularly vibrant greens and oranges (orange is notoriously difficult to reproduce with CMYK inks). The Hex process costs a little more, but maybe your job's worth it.

Read about Gamut here: http://www.newhorizons.co.uk/press/jargon.htm

Several years ago I was shocked to see how my sunset graphic turned out when printed. So I used 50% fluorescent ink in my orange ink mix (it was only a 2-colour job, not CMYK). The resulting letterheads were quite remarkable! But this is one hell of a fiddle and you'd need to be on very good terms with your printer, as he will have to wash his machine down to get rid of the contamination after your job!