I’m trying to create a multi color palette for a logo and I have an unusual problem. When I print the color palettes every color except purple prints out just fine. For some strange reason when I print with my HP laser printer the purple comes out as a dark blue. This is unacceptable because I don’t even like that particular shade of blue and it messes up the way the design looks. I need for it to print purple. Is anyone else having this problem? I’m using an HP Color Laserjet CP2025. This is driving me nuts. I’m wasting so much ink and paper trying to fix this and I would appreciate any help available. Thanks!
It’s a desktop laser printer. These machines are not particularly known for accurate color replication.
If you want it to print a particular color, all I can suggest is you do a ring-around (a stack of color blocks with the CMYK values changed in the direction you think the shift needs to go) then use the corrected color block values for your purple.
Of course, this will only work when printed on that particular Laser printer.
Or it could be that you have a color that is completely out of the printer’s gamut. IOW, it is incapable of reproducing the color with its toner set.
Were you printing from an RGB or a CMYK file? If you were printing from RGB, the purple could very easily have been outside the CMYK gamut, so when printing to CMYK on your printing, it got pulled to the closest CMYK color, which was bluer than you wanted.
In addition, dark purple and dark blue require a rather heavy mixture of all the process colors (except yellow), which makes slight differences in density between one or the other especially vulnerable to causing color shifts.
The more expensive desktop laser printers often have two additional toner cartridges that are variations of cyan and magenta — the main colors used to create purple. These two additional versions of these two process colors enable more accurate printing of colors — especially purplish hues.— that lie outside the 4-color CMYK gamut.
All this considered, dark, purplish indigo colors are probably the most difficult colors to print accurately — especially on business desktop printers that sacrifice color accuracy to keep the price lower.
How many of these issues are relevant to your situation, I don’t know. However, I’ve always tended to avoid dark purple colors in branding situations because they can be problematic. Even Pantone colors, such as reflex blue — a dark purplish blue — can be a pain in the butt for commercial printers to work with.
This printer is a standard 4-color desktop laser printer.
It is discontinued by HP.
It appears to be ca 2008 (first model)
Any number of things could be wrong. Anything. From an out of gamut color to an incompatible driver to bad internals…
