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by NHLoonphotog on Sun Oct 19, 2014 7:44 am
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It's time for the 4th run of my photo story book. It was created using MS Word and converted to a PDF. The first 3 runs were on a digital press but that costs 4 times as much as a longer run of a 1000 or more books on a webpress. My problem is, in the soft proof all the photos are washed out. We are on our 4th try with modifying the photos using photoshop. Any idea where I am going wrong?
 

by Royce Howland on Sun Oct 19, 2014 12:08 pm
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Moved to the Printing forum.

Your question relates to a sizable can of worms. Digital image editing on RGB monitors going to print on CMYK presses is something verging on a black art for those just beginning to work with CMYK. Probably not many of our members are well versed in it; certainly I'm not up to speed on the CMYK printing end of things.

The really short answer is, I'd recommend finding a photographer, photo editor or colour management specialist somewhere in your area that's well versed in digital RGB to CMYK press printing, and get help from that source. It might be at a cost. Many presses used to have folks that could assist in this, but it sounds to me like that may not be the case with your press. I hear it's not the case with many other presses, particularly those on the "budget" end of the spectrum. They just print what you give them and don't really have the guarantee (or ability) to produce a high degree of display-to-print match, nor the ability to advise much on achieving it.

My more effort-involving response is you'll need to get fully up to speed in the colour management workflow going from digital RGB to CMYK press printing. This will include a few critical items like the following:
  • Using a colour-critical display (e.g. NEC or Eizo or something with equivalent performance) that can be more precisely calibrated.
  • Calibrating the display for CMYK press work rather than for digital RGB work. (IDEAlliance standards and some others apply here; see this link for some background info: http://www.babelcolor.com/download/AN-4 ... cation.pdf .)
  • Soft-proofing using the appropriate CMYK press output profiles (advice needed from your press on that).
  • Potentially using some more advanced tools like Gamutvision or ColorThink to evaluate what the various profiles are doing to your images in terms of colour & contrast so you can more precisely see where adjustments may be needed; soft-proofing is only a rougher, visual approximation.
  • Making specific edits to your files after profile evaluation and/or during soft-proofing to compensate for the generally reduced contrast & gamut of CMYK press vs. digital RGB. But with the key that the mismatch is going to be more substantial in some areas than others, which is why tools like Gamutvision or ColorThink are more useful than just trying to eye-ball things by softproofing in Photoshop.
  • Paying attention to CMYK conversion including things like ink limits and dot gain that are not really a concern in digital RGB printing.
  • Hard proofing your design, as well as producing some test plates on the CMYK press itself, and making final adjustments based on that... because soft-proofing will only take you so far.
You might have specific need for improvement in any of these areas, or others. Without diagnosing specifically where the mismatch is coming in, it will be tough to say more. And diagnosing the issue here on the forum without hands-on with the files, the profiles, the devices in question, etc. is equally hard.

Also a final note is that CMYK press prints of your images in many cases should look fine, but in many other cases simply won't match. It's a limitation of the CMYK press print process. Depending on the colour & contrast range of your images, the media used for print, the press workup itself, etc. some of your images will not match the screen unless you take the images very far down to the lowest common denominator of colour & contrast supported by the press.

Feel free to follow up, although I don't know how far we'll be able to take this here unless somebody experienced in doing CMYK press book runs is able to chime in... :)
Royce Howland
 

by Trev on Sun Oct 19, 2014 4:21 pm
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Everything Royce said plus;
Get the cmyk profile from the printer and convert your rgb images to it in PS. Have an rgb version and cmyk version open in PS and use the out of gamut to see what is happening to the colours in the cmyk version (especially reds and greens) and make adjustment to compensate.

Ink limit is about 300% make sure you don't go over.

I've had 2 books published using offset printing and used the above to do the conversion came out great just remember as Royce said some images wont look as good as in rgb all you can do is process it as best as you can to get as close to the rgb version as possible.

I would suggest you ensure you do the appropriate conversion for each image yourself. Printers tend to do a global conversion of the images if you leave it to them, many of the images will look pretty bad.

Good luck and don't expect to do it in 10 minutes its quite time consuming to get it right.
Trevor Penfold
Website http://www.trevorpenfold.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/trevorpenfoldphoto
 

by jgunning on Mon Oct 20, 2014 9:56 am
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Royce and Trev have both given excellent advice. Years ago I was a journeyman printer, although I had little practical experience with the four color process. Royce's reference to a "black art" regarding CMYK conversions is well put.

My impression from reading your post, is that you need to start at the beginning with the digital photo files. Process them with a proper profile attached and then stay in a color managed workflow to the final submitted files to the printer. Doing the files in Word and then doing a conversion to PDF (I assume in Word as well) I don't know where that would leave you regarding color management. I guess what you mean by a "digital" press was an inkjet printer that takes RGB files. Now you are using a printing press having four color process inks that needs CMYK files.  


I had an article that was published in a magazine a few years ago. I asked the editorial staff if they wanted me to supply the photos in RGB or CMYK. (all were digital files from a Nikon D2X) They were prepared to work with either, but preferred the CMYK versions. They e-mailed me the profile used for the press, and I did the RGB to CMYK conversion using Photoshop and soft proofing as Royce and Trev have suggested. The photos turned out just fine, but the warning about reds and greens is very valid. Most of the photos needed some adjustment from the RGB versions to fall within gamut. (Mostly saturation-there was a deep-red painted surface that showed up in many of the photos) The process was not difficult, but I wondered how it would turn out when I sent the files to them. I spoke to the editor and he said they didn't have to adjust anything in the files I submitted. The final article was submitted to them as a text Word file and the CMYK photo files. They did the magazine layout.
 

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