How do I do this without getting banned … :ROTFL:
I have a bit different take on this than Guy, and shrink at countermanding his obviously successful approach. Yet, there are different ways to see all this.
I worked at an Offset Printer, then became an Art Director, then started doing my own Photography for some of the printed pieces I created. This is my skew on all this:
All four color offset printing is done in CMYK color gamut.
Whether it is Coke red, or Ford Oval blue, or FedEX Indigo/Orange , or Breast Cancer Pink … all of them must be extracted from the CMYK color gamut. Nothing can be offset printed outside of this gamut.
CMYK isn't anywhere near the Gamut of the Adobe RGB 1998 profile. Almost any modern monitor has a wider gamut than CMYK.
There are two schools of printing prep for photographic reproduction. Those that provide it as Adobe 1998 and leave it to pre-press to make the conversion, and those who prefer to make the CMYK conversion at the ad or collateral piece prep stage then adjust it during pre-press evaluation. This is why here are a zillion CMYK profiles in PS.
Color Printing 101: the RGB & CMYK gamuts
A vast majority of photographers provide as faithful an image as they can manage using Adobe 1998. So a monitor that mostly gets you there is desirable to cover your behind. If color repo goes bad, then someone afterwards screwed up.
However, it doesn't alter the fact that any image will be converted to the truncated CMYK color space.
The full gamut of an Adobe 1998 photo file will never be reproduced in offset printing, only approximated during the CMYK pre-press evaluation process.
Having made thousands of press runs to evaluate four color proofs and progressives on the actual paper stock to be used, or working with an ad agency Art Director and/or Production Manager to do that, I now make the conversion myself to make sure the color reproduction is closer to the reality of CMYK … (even though I still may provide the larger gamut Adobe 1998 profiled image because the printer can occasionally rip a bit more than I can).
Since my involvement is inception to fulfillment, this process has considerably simplified the pre-press evaluative process, and the reproduction of the photos has taken less pre-press work to approximate the original intent.
I still do advertising concepts, layouts & copy and often photograph the content myself. Now days, most of the Printers my clients use require that I provide the reproduction piece as High Quality Printer's PDF files in CMYK color space … so it all best best be right in CMYK.
Different strokes for different folks.
- Marc