Heres an example of whats happening. The Color Blend/ Gradient is just very poor when it becomes rasterized. This is Intended for print. We used to print RGB and would get really good saturated prints from RGB but recently some prints have been quite poor in comparison so I switched to CMYK. I think some of the printer's settings are different/ changed and figured CMYK would be a safe bet for printing purposes, but if theyre going to still look bad like this idk what to do.
Why is the color gradient becoming so gray and washed out?
Color management is more than managing color it's also about managing expectations.
If you create in RGB colors and print to different devices you'll get different results as the device will convert to the media profile with the gamut that the device is capable of producing. The reason some of your RGB colors turned out poor is that you created colors that your printer was unable to reproduce.
An 8 or 12 color inkjet may print much more closely to what you see on screen than a 6 color or 4 color inkjet. A cmyk laser printer may do better than a true CMYK printing press. However depending on the RGB color space you use in CorelDRAW none will match the screen.
When you convert to a CMYK bitmap the colors display in the CMYK gamut which is incapable of reproducing the RGB colors. CorelDRAW is just showing you what it will look like on press.
I'm not involved on the printing/ press side of things I just design the graphics. There were a few cases where the prints honestly looked better in the print than they did on my screen which blew me away. Some of the recent designs I've done I got to see and they were basically as bad as the example I've shown. This happened one time before and I told them something changed. I said it was probably whatever settings the printer has for reading and interpreting the color profiles. It seemed to get fixed until recently. And were so busy now that I thought it might be easier to just switch to CMYK so I could more accurately show myself how they would print.
Why doesn't Corel show it accurately before rasterizing?
You need to turn on color proofing and have it set to proof your CMYK profile. By default there's a little icon I believe top right in the work space active it and Draw proofs the entire display in CMYK.
The full explanation is a 4 page dissertation in providing an expanded gamut work environment which I assume you're looking to avoid.
thanks for your help! cant believe I didnt know about that
Just remember if you want to improve your color quality you'll need to get a grasp of color management and the details. Feel free to post here or send me a PM.
Keep this in mind it's a deep and complicated rabbit hole, as you learn more your quality gets better and more easily repeatable but you learn what's wrong with a huge amount of the work out there, the knowledge cuts both ways.
Yeah I went into the rabbit hole a couple years a go. Its super complex. I obviously still have a shallow understanding and it's been enough to get by for a the time being.
To be honest as long as you turn proofing on when needed setting rendering intent to Perceptual is all you need do.