Printing on Vinyl vs. Paper - help!
Hey all, I have a question that is really, really bugging me. 
I work for a rather large company, and I created a graphic for print that is 42.75"W x 35"H. For the image, I bought a high-res stock photo and resd it up and it still looks amazing when printed at full size. The stock image was already color corrected.
I had printed several copies of the final product on 2 different office printers - a color laserjet and a color inkjet, and both produced similar, and great-looking results.
I then sent the job to the sign company to print the final version, and it looked horrible (this was printed on vinyl and mounted on PVC board). The color was off by quite a good amount - so much so that the person in the stock photo looked like he was 'dead' (pale skin with dark magenta areas, hair was white-ish, there were 'halos' around areas of high contrast, and eyes had no color whatsoever, just kinda dead and white-grey).
Now the manager at the sign company tried to tell me that the issue was with the fact that the stock image had been 'color corrected for paper, not for vinyl' and that his printer was of 'such good quality that it must have picked up details not visible on my prints'. Can anyone attest to this fact - that it might be THAT different on a white vinyl vs. a white paper?
I was so shocked at the results that I asked him to reprint a variation of it that their designer came up with and I approved, which they are doing free of charge to me. But for this final version, they are taking my full size (300dpi) EPS and flattening to a jpg, then printing it.
I'm really nervous that it will come back looking horrible, but I really just don't know. Either way, it's costing my company $150 to print, I'm just so afraid it will come back looking just as bad, or even worse.
Any suggestions, or words of advice? I guess my main question is really whether the print should look so much different at the printer on vinyl, than it did on my office printers (2 of them) with an already color-corrected image. I mean, I taped together 24 pieces of paper in a grid to create a mockup of the final image in real size, and it looked even better than the final version from the sign printer (detail AND color).
Sorry for the long post, but thanks for your time.
I work for a rather large company, and I created a graphic for print that is 42.75"W x 35"H. For the image, I bought a high-res stock photo and resd it up and it still looks amazing when printed at full size. The stock image was already color corrected.
I had printed several copies of the final product on 2 different office printers - a color laserjet and a color inkjet, and both produced similar, and great-looking results.
I then sent the job to the sign company to print the final version, and it looked horrible (this was printed on vinyl and mounted on PVC board). The color was off by quite a good amount - so much so that the person in the stock photo looked like he was 'dead' (pale skin with dark magenta areas, hair was white-ish, there were 'halos' around areas of high contrast, and eyes had no color whatsoever, just kinda dead and white-grey).
Now the manager at the sign company tried to tell me that the issue was with the fact that the stock image had been 'color corrected for paper, not for vinyl' and that his printer was of 'such good quality that it must have picked up details not visible on my prints'. Can anyone attest to this fact - that it might be THAT different on a white vinyl vs. a white paper?
I was so shocked at the results that I asked him to reprint a variation of it that their designer came up with and I approved, which they are doing free of charge to me. But for this final version, they are taking my full size (300dpi) EPS and flattening to a jpg, then printing it.
I'm really nervous that it will come back looking horrible, but I really just don't know. Either way, it's costing my company $150 to print, I'm just so afraid it will come back looking just as bad, or even worse.
Any suggestions, or words of advice? I guess my main question is really whether the print should look so much different at the printer on vinyl, than it did on my office printers (2 of them) with an already color-corrected image. I mean, I taped together 24 pieces of paper in a grid to create a mockup of the final image in real size, and it looked even better than the final version from the sign printer (detail AND color).
Sorry for the long post, but thanks for your time.
) The color is what was really wrong with it. The only thing that I think COULD have been caused by resing up the image was the halo effect I saw, but that doesn't show on my screen or either of the prints I ran here in the office (at full size).
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