Spell fuschia

“What's your favorite color?” one asks.

“Fuschia.”

“Spell fuschia,” the follow-up comes.

“Ay, red na lang.”

This is a familiar joke. However, when one is working on graphics design, color and spelling or more precisely, specifications of printing jobs, are serious matter. Imagine working hard for hours on color combinations, getting the design approved, sending it to the printing press, then finally the printouts arrive, 2,000 copies in 20 bundles. You open one sample with all the excitement of seeing your brainchild metamorphose into reality, then bang! You were expecting fuschia but you get red. Or pink. Or violet. Now, is that funny at all?

Instead, your face turns from fuschia to red to pink to violet in horror and disappointment.

This series happened to me not a few times. Missing the spelling, getting the wrong color and face turning to violet. All of these.

By the way, Wikipedia has an entry for fuchsia, not fuschia. Fuchsia is a flowering shrub named after the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. The pronunciation for Fuchsia apparently led to people writing the term fuschia, referring to the color. Now, fuschia is more popular.

Going back, I took the extra effort of specifying RGB and CMYK values to the printer, saving in multiple formats, etc. but I'd still get inconsistent colors. This happens in spite of my understanding how colors may change from the raw material to the processed lines like camera, scanner, computer hardware, software, printer, printing press.

I finally turned to other resources. I searched the web including Adobe, Corel until I reached the International Color Consortium (ICC, www.color.org).

I have been using Corel frequently for years and Adobe rarely recently. I was thinking that maybe, the best move is to switch softwares. I tinkered with Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator both in Macintosh and Windows-based computers. I found one good trick to color fidelity.

Color Management. Or, color profile of the workspace. This can be Adobe RGB, internal RGB, sRGB, CMYK, Apple RGB, iec RGB, and others.


This is not the absolute solution. The other routine work should still be done. Software, hardware configuration and color specifications of RGB or CMYK values should still be matched with the printer. Or, ideally, the printer should match the printing requirement of the client.

Several weeks ago, I checked with the digital publishing and multimedia center of Ohio State and talked about color fidelity with some specialists. I was surprised to find out that they don't know about it. They're not even familiar with color profiles. I also went to FEDEX Kinkos here which is a popular printing center. Same story. Their technical staff do not know color profile settings.


Bitmap or digital pictures have more stable color scheme in itself. Vector graphics are most affected by color profiles. From here, Corel comes in, being the best vector graphics software for me (at this time). For those using Corel, open Corel Draw, go to Tools and click Color Management. You should see something like this:

Configure it as you desire. Some general notes:

>RGB is more vibrant than CMYK.

>Corel, by default, uses CMYK and/or Kodak DC color profile. Fortunately, color profiles can be changed. Notice the same color palette can give different blue in different profiles.

>Many printing press companies use CMYK profile for color separation.

>As a trick, the color profile may be set to RGB then specify the CMYK equivalent values when sending the job to the printing press. These values are numbers corresponding to Red, Green, Blue or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

>IEC profile looks more vibrant which makes it superior for non-print presentation like video, animation, powerpoint, etc. In other words, if you want some neon-like glow, IEC looks more suitable.

>The computer, that is, the monitor has its own color profile setting. Therefore, color profile can be set outside Corel. However, check for consistency.

>Most office hardwares (computer, camera, scanner, desktop printer) has RGB default.

Corel, in its default CMYK profile gives subdued colors. Bland. It may be dull, but you are not. Check the set up and spell it right.