Sometimes having RGB data in your InDesign file isn’t really a big deal. If you’ve placed an RGB image that’s properly tagged with a color profile, it should be correctly converted to CMYK on output. But there are other times when it’s not such a hot idea leaving that conversion to chance. Maybe you’ve copy/pasted text from Word or an object from Illustrator that was created in an RGB color space.
And now with CS4, if you add swatches using the Kuler panel, you’ll be adding RGB swatches.
Converting them manually isn’t all that big a deal but the built in conversion will leave you with CMYK numbers that are defined out several decimal places deep.
I know of no press in the world where you’ll see a difference between 36% cyan and 36.24% cyan and while leaving those numbers alone won’t cause a problem, there’s a little voice in my head that keeps whispering “fix that!”
My fellow Adobe User to User forums host and scripting guru Dave Saunders has come to the rescue once again with this terrific script which can be downloaded from here. Not only does it convert all of your RGB swatches to CMYK, but at the same time it rounds those numbers off to eliminate those annoying decimal percentages.
A bit of tweaking may still be in order, but at least you’ll be starting from a whole number.
In the mean time, I just wish that little voice would shout “FIX THAT!” to the engineers at Adobe. :)
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on November 13, 2008
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