How to fix colors in a pages file so they are correct when printed professionally

Question

I created bus cards in pages and when I recieved them from the printer the colors were very muted and washed out compared to my monitor.  How can I fix this when I reorder them so I get the colors that I want?

Answer 1

> don't confuse the O.P. There is no way you can print exactly what you see on the screen, paper will never match that
> That means still only optimally approximating what you see on screen.
General questions on ICC colour management can be posted on at www.color.org for answer by Dr Phillip Green of the London College of Printing. Specific questions on ICC colour management implementation in Apple Mac OS X can be posted to the Apple ColorSync Users list or to Apple Discussions for particular application products.
In general, with a photographic print (to reflective paper or transparent film) and a separations camera (Esko, Agfa, Kodak) in the nineteen-seventies or a colour separations scanner (Crosfield, ****, Screen, Scitex) in the nineteen-eighties, there was a viewable graphic as reference between the photographer and the lithographer.
Interchange formats for images (TIFF, JPEG, PNG and more), for page descriptions (PostScript, PDD, PDF and more), and internationalised connectivity infrastructure have brought about a situation where colourants in pixel patterns and scalable vector shapes are distributed in blind interchange.
In a digital scan or digital camera capture, there is no viewable graphic on a physical medium. There is only colourant data in a colourant format (emissive and additive RGB, reflective and subtractive CMY, CMYK, CcMmYK, Gray, for instance).
Australian metaphysics aside, it is an impossible proposition that there be no interchange of colourimetry interchange in order that interchange of colourants be supported by specification of the colours intended to be formed by those colourants on digital graphic devices.
A photographer working in Australia has no possible way of anticipating what devices are available to audiences in Austria, or what configuration those devices have (gamma setting for displays, paper selection for printers, for instance).
What the photographer does is Create Once, Convert Many: Colour correct the exposure using the ICC device profile for the capture device, convert into a suitable interchange space, and don't change the colourants on disk ever again.
The ICC colour management system will pluc the input colourimetry specification into a subregion of the PCS Profile Connection Space, plug the output colourimetry specification into a subregion of the PCS Profile Connection Space, and task the CMM Colour Management Module to convert the pixels.
The display used by the photographer is the destination device in the photographer's ColourWorld and the displays used by the audience are the destination devices in the ColourWorlds they create with the device profiles for their custom configurations.
The display colour space is not interchanged, it is only invoked locally for - surprise, surprise - display. The interchange colourimetry space defines which colours can be output, because it is impossible to output colours that cannot be defined in the interchange colourimetry space.
If the CIEL*a*b* D50 colourimetry for 10% Cyan on glossy paper under ISO 12647 cannot be defined in sRGB, then the photographer who chooses sRGB as interchange colourimetry space cannot provide that colour even if the colour in principle could be rendered on a given device.
Precisely the same pertains for transliteration in small character sets such as ANSI X3.4–American Standard Code for Information Interchange. For instance, ASCII cannot input æ, Æ as in Hans Christian Andersens Keiserens nye Klæder, Eng. The Emperor's New Robes, so æ, Æ cannot be interchanged.
Whether the user locally has a good viewing condition, a mediocre viewing condition or a madcap viewing condition is immaterial to the working of the ICC colour management system for interchange of colourimetry information.
Colour management as such is not a craft or art, but a science. Art is part of the science of colour management in that there is no science that says which way is best for vectoring colours outside a destination gamut into that destination gamut.
Thus no two profiling packages will vectorize out of gamut colours precisely the same, nor will any two colour correctors. Similarly, no two type designers will vectorize (kern) interglyph spacing the same, because that is part of visual art and not part of science.
In general, please post proper technical information on ICC colour management. Posting that colour communication for blind interchange in information society is impossible is helpful to no-one, and is simply non-sense from the start.
/hh