Printing TIFF leading to colour misalignment

worc

About 6 months ago I did up a leaflet for a friends business in photoshop (CS2), went to printers and the proof they printed off had colours for the text misaligned in that it was almost as if the two colours that made up the one text colour weren't correctly printing ontop of each other and was instead like a dropshadow effect. One printing company spent an hour trying to figure it out and couldn't explain it (then tried telling me it was normal and that it looked fine which it most certainly didn't) but went to another company who immediately said it was due to some bloody thing I can't remember! I didn't really grasp his description at the time and was more relieved the problem was solved, I think he mentioned something to do with the way I had setup the TIFF image...but for the life of me I can't remember specifics. When creating a new file in photoshop I set resolution to 300dpi, choose CMYK and then basically save it as a TIFF.

I am looking to print off about 5,000 pages for personal work I'm doing but I'm thinking of using an online print/delivery company (as costs seem to be much less) so if the error is on my part in the way I am preparing the images I don't want to end up with a bunch of useless prints and these companies seem to print what they get and don't proof them (which is understandable given the business model they use) so my error wouldn't be caught until they arrive at my door.

My background is in product design so not fully versed in bringing things to print and was curious if someone knows of how this may have occured and is there something I may be doing that can lead to this problem?

looksee

This is a guess, as I have never had this happen. If the psd had been flattened before making a tiff the image could not have part of it registered and part of it not. Its essentially a photograph, and while the whole thing could be mis-registered, it could not partly happen.

I suspect that you made a psd with layers into a tiff with layers and sent that to the printers. They would then put it into a page layout program, probably Quark, and for whatever reason all the layers did not align.

Flatten your psd (as a copy) and convert it to a tiff, then preferably bring it into a page layout program to add block text and small headings. You can also print off separations yourself to see if they look right.

worc

Yeah that's possible I didn't flatten the image - what was annoying was that it printed off perfectly for me on my home printer...

I might pay for proofs printed by the company who sorted it last time before sending them off to be 100% safe.

Cheers for advice.

looksee

A home printer will pretty well print whatever is on the screen, its when you take a job to another system that the problems can show up.

Pixelcraft

You should be using pantone swatches for colours, not doing this in photoshop. You need to be working in CYMK not RGB, also if it was black text make sure your colour breakdown is C=0 Y=0 M=0 K=100 and not a mixture of all 4.

From a printing point of view, the registration is technically out, but it's still your problem and to do with the way you are creating the artwork.

But again, don't use photoshop for this, use something like indesign, you should have text as vector art and not raster, which is what flattening is doing.