i've been having some trouble lately and i'm hoping someone here can help. when i save a tif. file and use the CMYK option, it overly separates the colors and pulls all the density from the darker colors creating a halo effect. my new editor is busting my chops, telling me it's not up to their specs and i need to adjust my CMYK settings. how do i solve this issue. i haven't changed how i do anything and other editors i've worked for have never complained about this before.  i've attached an example, i did lighten it some to make it more visable. thanks for any help " />

I'm no printing expert as some of the people on here are, but my limited forays into the CMYK arena have shown that saturated colours do not translate well from RGB to CMYK. If you select out of gamut warning and view as cmyk it should grey out the problem colours. Do you know which cmyk profile the printer will be using?

i have no clue. the production manager said i should have my K or black always set at 100% and the C-M-Y colors set at 60-40-40 respectively. i have found no settings in corel painter XI.5 for cmyk densities. i'm figuring it's a PS C3 adjustment? rgb looks fine this only happens when converted to CMYK!

Painter doesn't have any CMYK options apart from being able to save the file in that format. You will need to adjust the settings in Photoshop. The gamut warning option that was mentioned is in Photoshop.

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i figured as much. do we know why corel causes that separation and density change? can photshop fix that when it saves it in a tif/cmyk format? if it can, then what's the best file format i should use to make it easier? jpeg or can i still send them as a tif but as an RGB. their production guy is gonna' have to do it because i don't have a photoshop version past elements 5.0.

thanks for all the help

Like nimh said, it's about what colours you used to paint it with. CMYK has a narrower range of available colours because its based on mixing inks. RGB has far more colours because it comes from light. So you would need to adjust the colours in the image to get them into a valid CMYK range. You will have to save an RGB tiff and send it to them to do the conversion/seperations as you can't do it yourself in the version of PS you have. I don't know if GIMP supports CMYK properly yet, but you could have a look at that.

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which of adobes products (illustrator,elements or CS3,4) will allow me to what is needed in supporting and adjusting CMYK colors and densities. adobe's web site was of little help. Also where can i get one without having to sell my house and first born?

thanks again, you've all been a big help!

I don't think elements has CMYK (could be wrong I haven't looked at it for ages). The full version of Photoshop in any version would be enough. You could try sacrificing a chicken

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what about illustrator, it's also inexpensive compared to a CS4.a few hundred bucks vs. 5 or 6 hundred bucks! the chicken, we will BBQ! dinner is at my house if i can get solved!

I don't know enough about Illustrator to be able to offer an opinion on how good it's CMYK tools are. I can tell you that I tried to sacrifice some chicken nuggets once with little success.

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Sketchbook Pro 2010 has some CMYK support and is pretty inexpensive, I got it off amazon for about $63 US, the price seems to vary depending on what day you look at it, but retail its $100.  That said, I can't say definitively whether it has the use of CMYK you are looking for, you can basically create palettes/choose colors using CMYK sliders, which I assume can be saved that way. There is no way (that I'm aware of) to adjust those colors once they are in the image with those sliders from within SBPro.

banjaxedmdt:

I don't know if GIMP supports CMYK properly yet, but you could have a look at that.

last time i looked Gimp didn't support cmyk properly. (*whispers - i got around the problem short term by using the time limited trial of CS3 from the cover disc, worked a treat, and I was able to view the pdfs the printers emailed me too) I'm looking for a cheap legal version of cs2 upwards now.

I did a quick Google and there appears to be some plugins for GIMP with add some CMYK abilities. Don't know if they are any use because I don't use GIMP.

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thanks for everyone's help with this matter. my editor found a very inexpensive version of photoshop CS3 (i don't know how he did it or who he knows) for me. so know i get to learn another program! yeah! i guess i needed to start using PS sooner or later, at least i can take the files back and forth between corel and PS.  thanks again!