I use Gamma Control and have targets for each printer I use whether it be my Epson, a photo lab (all those are RGB) or in CMYK for any one of several printing companies I use in my brokering. Once you have a clean representation of a target then what ever you bring up on the screen is what you will see coming off press. and yes I can talk you through those if you need help, you need to set the Photoshop color prefs which I can also help with.

Once you've completed all the steps calibrating. for PCs too.īut first you need your monitor optimized by some hardware device like SpyderII. If you use a Mac you can get Gamma Control - a freeware application. Without that you are kind of poking holes in the dark (guessing) for color. It wouldn't be bad at the start to make sure you're close otherwise spend the $ to profile your system if you're a long way off.)Ĭlick to expand.I may be able to help.įirst, you really need a calibrated monitor. Optimally if you have a color profile / your monitor is profiled you can get the closest match of the cmyk image on screen to what their proof looks like which is what they'll shoot for on press. Second, the color calibration of the system you're working on. First the major RGB to CMYK conversion where some colors will not reproduce exactly and some tweaking may be required to get a nice pleasing result. Now as an added complication, when you say 'But the printer now tells me the resulting colour printing will be different to the original, not so 'colourful' because the initial work wasn't done in CMYK format!' there are two things at play. but adding plates (colors) will definitely increase your cost, so before considering this see how pleasing a result you can obtain manually adjusting the cmyk images in step #2. uncoated.)Ģ.) once you've converted to cmyk, now within the more limited confines of the CMYK space, you can manually tweak problematic colors to be more pleasing by manually adjusting the CMYK levels for those colors.ģ.) if you can't work within the gamut limits, then it depends on the type of art how to proceed (and budget) Additional colors can be added to increase the overall gamut or spot colors if there are a few specific bright colors that need to be addressed for example.

(check with your press for basic optimal values and then plug these in under edit: color settings in Photoshop or the corresponding area in your application, e.g. Going from RGB to CMYK you will not be able to produce the full range of RGB colors because the CMYK gamut is smaller.ġ.) are you doing the 'automatic' RGB -> CMYK conversion correctly and not throwing out the baby with the bath water. But it will at least give you a second option and will give you the tools to control how the cmyk image looks. Click to expand.I'm not familiar with the software you're using, so I'm not sure what control you have now.

Free rgb to cmyk converter