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• • September 4, 2018 at 5:00 am #110218
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Hi,

    I need some advise on a common workflow. I’m just a little confused and unable to guide in the right way. The person on the other hand is very strict and needs an explanation for everything.

    Scenario:

    a) I have a JPG supplied by client. This JPG is used on a layout with some minimal text with it (a kind of advert).

    b) The client now wants three PDFs with three different color profiles, i.e.
    i) FTnews_101007p1_240K30_1v2_U.icc
    ii) SNAP_220_2009.icc
    iii) US Web Coated (SWOP) v2.icc

    What I have done is…
    I have created three JPGs embedded with each color profile. However, there’s a drastic color change in the image while assigning the FTnews color profile, it looks more Blueish now.

    The output PDF is supposed to be ‘PDF/X-1a’ for all three.

    So my concern is whether I should color correct all the three images (after applying the intent color profile) and make it similar to the source image or should I leave it as is.

    … or is there anything I’m missing here.

    Please advise.

  • September 6, 2018 at 8:07 am #110287
    Gustavo Sánchez Muñoz

    Member

    Hi,

    I’d always do the correction *before* converting from RGB to CMYK with ‘preview CMYK output’ in Photoshop.

    If it’s a one-time job with just one picture, it will be easier to make three versions of the picture (each time from RGB to CMYK with the needed profile, never from CMYK to CMYK) and then placing the three versions of the picture with the optimal correction in each document with the proper CMYK profile as ouput intent.

    Of course, we assume a calibrated workflow and an educated individual on the receiving end (which is not the same as ‘strict’ ;) ).

    For a more complex work (more pictures or documents involved), it’d be a sloppy way of working, though.

    Just my opinion.

  • September 7, 2018 at 8:19 am #110292
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Thanks Gustavo, I appreciate, sharing your knowledge here. It seems I’m following the right process. We did the color correction before creating the PDFs.

  • September 7, 2018 at 9:38 am #110293
    Gert Verrept

    Member

    Masood,

    I just created two pdfs starting with a rgb image. I placed the image in Indesign and exported as a pdf with the required presets. As expected a colour shift is noticeable. I must admit, i don’t convert first into cmyk, I let the “flow” do it.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/6yzozz2wcnp2pmr/ft.pdf?dl=0
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/riiceubkhm5dnma/snap.pdf?dl=0

  • September 11, 2018 at 1:44 am #110363
    Gustavo Sánchez Muñoz

    Member

    Hi,

    Elaborating the issue, the advantage of converting *first* in Photoshop comes when you have a given picture that would benefit clearly from a manual intervention and you do it (best before converting to CMYK).

    (And even then, you could let the picture stay in RGB and just apply adjustment layers and masks so as not to alter the picture data in a non reversible way.)

    Otherwise, it is true that, if what you are going to do is just changing the image to CMYK from Photoshop, there’s no advantage whatsoever over doing that straight away in InDesign while exporting to PDF. The color conversion would be exactly the same given the same parameters (ie: colour profiles and rendering intent applied).

    I guess that nowadays is best to make the RGB-CMYK conversion as late as possible in the workflow.

  • September 14, 2018 at 4:25 am #110402
    Masood Ahmad

    Participant

    Thanks Gert and Gustavo for your giving your inputs on this. I really appreciate it.

    The original image supplied by the client was already in CMYK. Apart from this, I work with the team who do not follow the RGB images workflow. It is strictly mentioned in all the process to convert the images to CMYK before doing anything. So there’s no point explaining them the benefits of using RGB images. They don’t listen :(

    What we have here is, we created three images, applied the color profile, did the color correction and finally created the PDF.

    Anyway thanks again for your suggestions and inputs.

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