I'm sure every one new to digital has had the problem of adapting from screen to printed image. I have a problem that is making me tear my hair out and I was wondering if any of you experts could help

Having been asked to produce an CD album cover for a friend; I designed it in Photoshop (on a PC) to the size specified, printed it out and got the OK to flatten it and send it as a .tiff to the manufacturers so that they could put it into Quark Express 4 (on their Mac), convert it to CMYK and send it to their printers to be printed as part of the CD duplication process.

As you can imagine, I had a nasty shock when it appeared on the screen of the manufacturer's Mac. My scan of brown paper which I had put in the background for texture had turned orange! and something strange had happened to the saturation. I asked him what colour profile he was using and he explained that although he is a(n expert)sound man he isn't good at graphics, he didn't think he had a colour profile assigned and couldn't tell me what CMYK settings the printer used.

 I presume this is something to do with converting from PC to Mac but I worry that the same thing will happen again when he sends the file to the printers (paranoid). What would any of you do in the same (too many cooks) situation? should I change the colour profile, adapt it to his screen and test printer (test print lacked contrast and looked a bit washed out) or.....? ( any suggestions gratefully appreciated).

If you used colours that are out of gamut (which your comment about saturation suggests) there will always be problems converting to CMYK. It has nothing to do with the conversion from PC to Mac or QuarkXpress (which doesn't convert colours, anyway).

The moral of the story is - make sure you do the artwork in CMYK, or at least convert it yourself before handing it over to anyone.  

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em.. do you think you should work in cmyk only if you intend to print or should you just do it anyway? i always wonder that! 

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Personally I would work in RGB and convert to CMYK if and when needed. It's easy enough to keep control of your colours to make sure they are within gamut, and will save you a load of headaches if you intend to print on a domestic printer.

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ok so it's really only for professional printing then. 'k i get it, phew, i thought it was gonna be one of those head exploding things like the dpi stuff! lol thanks banj

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Just don't use any colours that give you an exclamation mark in the colour picker, and you should be fine.

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lol, i don't think i've ever noticed an exclamation mark! must have been ok or i could be just very very blinkered! thanks em.. 

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 Thanks Em. So you're saying that I should convert the image to CMYK before sending it as a tiff for him to put into Quark express? I haven't worked with CMYK much.It appears to give you one image for each of the printing plates (I presume) Does it matter if I don't have the CMYK settings for the final printing destination? or is there a default I can use? I had no idea that professional printing would be so complicated. .

I would check your colours before saving out a CMYK file. In the view menu is an option to view a CMYK gamut warning. Anything outside the CMYK range of colours will show as a nasty grey splodge. You can then adjust your colours to get rid of it.

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OK. Thanks for that tip, Banj. I 'll have a look,- see if my archaic versionof elements has that feature. lol

No it doesn't- (need to save up faster for the full version obviously) not in theprogram I use for conversion either.

 shall I leave the default separation set up at:

 black generation 36% UCR amount 20%total ink limit 400%? [:$ complete novice]

 

 

 I see Gimp 2.4 allows you to specify out of gamut colours in file> preferences> colour management (but that assumes that you have a disc). I'll have a play with that. thanks for your help everyone.

i've got 2 'painter essentials' disc (lucky me's got two wacoms) i'd be happy to give you one nimh, and you live in 'the toon' which is where i used to live so, you know, i owe you, lol, no seriously, you can have one if you want, it's a cut down version of painter, you might like it. 

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Ah Kaz, thats really sweet of you, (a geordie lass eh?, lol), no need though. That's why I've been saving, to get my intuos 3 so I've got Painter Essentials3 and yes it's great for traditional pencil type drawing, and watercolour effects (I find the rotate tools and adjustment layers etc in Photoshop elements easier to handle). I remember going green when you said you had a Cintiq (lucky you). Does painter essentials have a CMYK feature then?

ummm, i have to confess to never even loading it! lol, i just can't get away with painter, i keep trying, but it keeps kicking me in the teeth & ya don't want that when you're trying to create a masterpiece.... lol so i don't know about it, at all, i wish i did. 

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I lived in Northampton for 2 years about 20 years ago lol, used to work at the General (Hospital). so I know it a bit too. Thanks  Kaz