PrintFab Query

[Roberto Smith]

So I've been looking into the PrintFab software as a way to print more saturated colours. Before I go tinkering around with it I want to go over my situation here and ask some advice (if anyone on here knows how to use PrintFab),

I design custom stickers for Lego sets. I design them in a program called Sure Cuts A Lot (SCAL), which is a program for designing stickers sheets, then I print them on my Canon Pixma Pro 100s printer and the cut them using a vinyl cutting machine. Using this set up I get okay results but struggle to get the primary colours (RGB) to match the colour of the Lego bricks (red, green and blue Lego bricks have very deep saturated colours).

The issue I have is that SCAL only displays in sRGB - there is not really any colour management with the program. I have a custom ICC profile for my printer which makes the colours look better but they still aren't saturated enough. I know my printer can print the right colours as I used to have Adobe Illustrator and if I designed something in this program and changed the colour space to AdobeRGB, when I printed the red, green and blues were a much closer match to the actual Lego brick colour (more saturated). However I can't design and print the sticker sheets from Illustrator, nor do I want to pay £25 a month subscription for something that I would use occasionally (even if printing the sticker sheets were possible from AI).

What I basically need is the same setup I have now (design and print the stickers from SCAL) but an extra step that say "print colours with more saturation". I want to keep using the same design software and custom ICC profile, I just need a colour gamut more in line with AdobeRGB rather than sRGB. Is this kind of tweak possible with PrintFab? Does anyone have any experience with it who can help?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I was a kind of testing and using PrintFab longer time ago but didn't like it, icc profiles for use with Printfab did not yield any larger gamuts of those profiles, you cannot expect that a higher ink density delivers more color saturation - there is a limit - you may get ink puddles on your paper and/or you reach a point that more ink even reduces the color saturation - there is a point of saturation reversal. If you put the driver into the icc off mode you get the maximum , the paper selection defines the ink limits - per ink channel and for a total of mixed inks.
Which type of data file is your program generating - tiff - jpg ?
Did you try to use photo/graphics editing software ? there are several pretty capable programs of this type available for free which would allow you to manipulate image files -e.g. increasing saturation.

 

[The Hat]

Does anyone have any experience with it who can help?

I have never used PrintFab software, but have used Illustrator to print my Vinyl stickers, the way I compensated to make stronger colours was to print the same colours twice by putting the sheet through the printer again, registration was not always spot on dough..

 

[Smile]

First You need to know if the colors you want to reproduce fits in your printer color space. sRGB has nothing to do with your problem at this stage.

PrintFAB promised to make a linearization print possible but never delivered it.