Why your screen sucks for choosing a colour when printing signs
When choosing a colour for printing signs, it is important to realise that what you see on your screen is probably not what you are going to get on your finished product. Why you ask? Well, that is the focus of this informative blog post…!
There are a stack of reasons, that aren’t limited to the ones below, but here are 5 reasons that your screen isn’t so good to use when choosing a colour for your sign.
- Everyone’s screen is different! You might have the latest shiny 27 inch apple mac screen, our sticker printing machine might be hooked up to a 50 inch Samsung TV screen linked to a computer, you might have a cheap and nasty screen you stole from your Nana’s shed. Regardless, every screen is different – which means that every screen will have a slightly different output in regards to your sign colours.
- Every screen will have different settings! We might have our brightness at 50% you might have it at 30%, Nana might need it at 90% – your settings as well as your screen mean that everything is different!
- Your room is probably different to every one else’s – you might have window with sunlight from the roof/left wall/right wall, or a grey wall. Or a wall of stickers or posters, it might have reflections of other monitors or the TV if you are working off a laptop. This affects what you see on your screen, and this will probably vary due to the time of day.
- There might be screen burn in the screen from having it on too long without a screen saver, or dead pixels – your monitor might just be a little busted up.
- Different stock will also affect the finish – ie printing on clear sticker stock vs white stock, adding a matt or gloss laminate.
Regardless of the reason for the difference, the standard rule here is that you cannot use your screen to determine the finished colour of the artwork on your sign. If you provide the CMYK values we can plug and play with those, but if you want a definite colour finish the best idea is to provide a pantone colour – we can colour match that directly off our pantone chart.
What is a pantone color? We will update this blog post with a new one that explains about these..!