Pre-Press color Matching

ifocus

I am about to prepare a book and send it to a commercial printer. The printer tells me that he is using Pantone Solid Coated CMYK settings. I am not sure what this is suppose to mean for colors.

I am planning with soft proof TIFF images in the CMYK spaces and use the SWOP U.S. CMYK Coated icc profile. Are I correct to do this? Should I just leave the images in sRGB?

Thanks

JY

jfriend

ifocus wrote:

I am about to prepare a book and send it to a commercial printer. The printer tells me that he is using Pantone Solid Coated CMYK settings. I am not sure what this is suppose to mean for colors.

I am planning with soft proof TIFF images in the CMYK spaces and use the SWOP U.S. CMYK Coated icc profile. Are I correct to do this? Should I just leave the images in sRGB?

Thanks

JY

You should ask the printer for the CMYK icc profile for their printers. And, ask them if you should submit the images in that profile or in sRGB? Unlike sRGB, there are many, many different CMYKs - it is not a single standard.

If you can submit the images in that profile, then you can just convert to that profile and see how the colors will look. If you aren't supposed to convert to that profile, then you can soft proof in it to see. Most CMYK profiles are more limited than sRGB so they contain fewer colors. Whether that impacts your image or not depends upon the colors in your image. For printing a book, it sounds like it would be well worth it to get this right before printing. Ask your printer.