I’m working on a printed ad using a few stock images. As most of you print designers know, before you send a file to press you need to convert it to CMYK. More often than not, when you make that conversion in PS you loose some of the brilliance of the imagery.
I’m curious to know what tricks you print designers use to retain some of the original brilliance of your images. I’ve played around a little with HDR and some of the other image enhancement settings, but I really haven’t developed a good formula for producing consistently good images.
I suppose this is one of the problems with being a freelance designer. I’m a jack of all trades, but a master of none, or very few.
For me, I always “convert to profile”. If not already, I first convert to Adobe RGB, and then convert to “whatever CMYK you use.” Not “apply”, but “convert to”. It’s important to know what CMYK profile your print house uses.
These steps -for me- are the safest steps in order to stay as close as I can to the origional RGB color space.
RGB Color space is much broader than the CMYK color space. All RGB colors that are outside of the CMYK color space will get converted to the closest CMYK values.
And yes that might result in subtile as well as in dramatic changes.
When these changes only appear in halftone images, than there’s nothing you can do. When the color is an supporting color you might want to use Pantone colors.
On 21 Oct 2013, 8:08 pm, Richard van Heukelum wrote:
For me, I always “convert to profile”. If not already, I first convert to Adobe RGB, and then convert to “whatever CMYK you use.” Not “apply”, but “convert to”. It’s important to know what CMYK profile your print house uses.
These steps -for me- are the safest steps in order to stay as close as I can to the origional RGB color space.
Richard
Thanks Richard. I never thought about asking my printer for a color profile.
As I suspected, my printer is using U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, which is pretty standard. The problem I tend to have is trying to print a client proof on my Epson WF-7520 wide format proofing printer, which tends to print colors a lot more brilliant than my printer’s commercial printing press will print.
just from a different angle than Richard, as I rarely work directly with the printers (I’m the middle man between the design agency and printers a lot of the time), I use Photoshop at its default settings to convert from RGB to CMYK and as you say this will lose some brilliance.
After this step, I make sure the levels are ok - especially the black to give the picture a bit of ‘oomph’ and then saturate the whole thing by about 10%. Yes, some parts may go out of gamut, but they wouldn’t print anyway.
It’s done me well for 30 years!
Trev
On 21 Oct 2013, at 20:21, RavenManiac wrote:
I’m working on a printed ad using a few stock images. As most of you print designers know, before you send a file to press you need to convert it to CMYK. More often than not, when you make that conversion in PS you loose some of the brilliance of the imagery.
I’m curious to know what tricks you print designers use to retain some of the original brilliance of your images. I’ve played around a little with HDR and some of the other image enhancement settings, but I really haven’t developed a good formula for producing consistently good images.
I suppose this is one of the problems with being a freelance designer. I’m a jack of all trades, but a master of none, or very few.
