I have created some vector drawings for the web or electronic viewing only. I now need to convert some of this stuff for print and when I convert from RGB to CMYK, the colours lose their vibrancy. and when I'm converting, I no longer have the picker to work with.
Can someone help? ... please and thanks.
Thanks.
Cowtoon said: I have created some vector drawings for the web or electronic viewing only. I now need to convert some of this stuff for print and when I convert from RGB to CMYK, the colours lose their vibrancy. and when I'm converting, I no longer have the picker to work with. Can someone help? ... please and thanks. Thanks.
Since RGB has 16.8 millions colors and CMYK only 64.000, the difference is easy to understand. btw a correct color profile will produce a better change, according with the material and system of printing. But the brilliant and luminous colors of RGB will loose bright when you convert to CMYK
Terremoto said: No need to convert them at all. Just print them as is. Trust me, they'll come out just fine. Dan
No need to convert them at all. Just print them as is. Trust me, they'll come out just fine.
Dan
This is an dangerous advice. Some RIP can convert from RGB to CMYK, suing their internal color profiles, but not all do it, and not all have this option enabled. On almost all case, if you send a, RGB image the result will be a pale image, without bright, color and contrast...If you are not really sure that the RIP has this feature, never send an RGB image. On 99% of the time the result will be wrong
Ariel said:Since RGB has 16.8 millions colors and CMYK only 64.000, the difference is easy to understand.
Every pixel in a true color image has 256 possible values for each of it's red, green or blue components (in the RGB model) or cyan, magenta, yellow and black (in the CMYK model).
This means that a 24 bit (3 x 8 bit) RGB image can have 256 x 256 x 256 possible combinations or 16,777,216 possible colors.
Each pixel in a 32-bit (4 x 8 bit) CMYK image is one of 256 x 256 x 256 possible colors x 256 variations of black. This is an awful lot of colors but in Draw we are limited to 100 steps instead of 256, which makes the number of possible combinations smaller (still though; 100,000,000 colors, theoretically).The color space is the same though, but as mentioned, much smaller than the RGB space anyway.
Ariel said: No need to convert them at all. Just print them as is. Trust me, they'll come out just fine. Dan
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My experience comes from the signmaking industry and outputting to wide format digital printers. I've used Onyx, VersaWorks, Wasatch, and I've played around with the demo version of Caldera. All of them accept RGB and provide excellent output on all the Rolands, Mimakis, Mutohs that I've run.
When I first started using a wide format digital printer I had two days with the fellow I was replacing. He showed me the color charts they'd printed out and how to use them to match colors. He tried to explain to me how you had to tweak this color and that color and that he always had trouble getting a nice rich black. He did all his design work in CMYK and was a "Graphic Design Graduate" from a large technical school here in Canada. At the time I assumed he must have known what he was talking about.
I struggled with getting the colors to come out the way I expected they should so I started doing a bit of research into setting up a proper ICC compliant workflow. First thing I discovered was that CMYK isn't really a standard. Sure, you have a bunch of CMYK color profiles available with a stock install of CorelDraw and here in North America U.S. Web Coated (Swop) v2 tends to be the default. Fair enough. The values that show up for any particular CMYK color you pick from the CorelDraw CMYK palette should theoretically map to the U.S. Web Coated (Swop) v2 profile. To map straight across the printer / RIP itself needs to set to U.S. Web Coated (Swop) v2. Trouble is that the ink-sets for the various CMYK printers out there vary a lot. Roland's Yellow is different than HP's and they're more than likely different than Mimaki's.
After a bunch of reading and head scratching I finally came to the conclusion that the workflow needed to be linearized. Calibrate the monitor with the Eye1 we have here. Create a proper profile for the printer using the data collected by the Eye1 from the color output of the digital printer. Now I've got those two synced up.
Talked to a bunch of color management gurus and they all said do your designing in sRGB for the following reasons:
So basically I've done it both ways as well as just crossing my fingers and winging it. Linearizing the equipment I use with the Eye1 and designing in sRGB has saved me a ton of time, a bunch of hair pulling and generally made my life a whole lot simpler and my output considerably more consistent and predictable.
That's why I'm sticking to my guns on designing in RGB.