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What is difficult for most people to understand is there is a world of difference between screen colors (RGB) and printed color (CMYK). Screen colors a composed of shades of red green and blue lights (LED) or phosphors. The gamut or number of colors that can be seen is much much higher for RGB color.

So even if your monitor is perfectly calibrated, the difference between what you see on the screen and what you see when printed is quite different.

The process color cyan prints much deeper, what I would call Peacock Blue. Blues, greens, violets tend to shift a lot and in printed form are much less bright and vibrant.

I have a very well calibrated monitor that can display over 1 billion colors vs. 16.7 million colors for most monitors but I know that the printed colors are going to look different.

I have been doing this long enough, and coming from a background of pre-computer advertising and graphic design, I can more or less predict how certain colors will translate from the screen into print. But in spite of what some people claim, to me it is still an inexact science.

My basic rule of thumb is, does the color look convincing. For example, if someone looked at the printed version of your playing cards, would they know if the color was shifted one way or the other? Now if you have flesh tones that have shifted towards green or purple or red or orange, these are more obvious shifts. But if the printed output is convincing, then that is all that really matters. Because your end user only sees what is in front of her or his eyes.