I am in the process of printing a book of my images.
I began the process using Blurb but have been unhappy with the physical print quality of their product. Much of the poor print quality has clearly been their fault – randomly streaky/blotchy prints, or strong regular vertical banding. To their credit, they have stood behind their product and offered to reprint these books (at this point I'd prefer my money – but they won't do that). I have begun to wonder if part of the issue with my too dark prints though is their recommended method of colour management.
My images began as 16-bit, ProPhoto TIFs. Blurb provides a generic profile for the HP Indigo press. I have soft-proofed to this profile as I would for an inkjet print job on my own machine. My files are now soft-proofed 16-bit, ProPhoto TIFs.
Their advice is:
"In the PDF to Book workflow, all RGB color spaces are converted to sRGB, then to CMYK at the HP Indigo print device. Therefore, all CMYK color spaces remain as is and are not converted. Depending on your preferred color space, you'll want to follow these guidelines for optimal print results:
1. If your images are already sRGB, it is not necessary to convert to CMYK because the HP Indigo is preset to convert sRGB to CMYK.
2. If your images are Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, Colormatch RGB, or another RGB color space, the optimal workflow is to convert your images to the CMYK profile optimized for the HP Indigo presses that Blurb uses. This ICC profile – HP5000SemimatteExp05.icc – can be downloaded at
http://blurb.com/downloads/HP5000SemimatteExp05.icc. Color conversion is best done via an imaging program, such as Adobe® Photoshop®,prior to placing your images or graphics into Adobe® InDesign® or your preferred layout tool. "
Does this advice make sense? I am confused as to why I am converting to the profile. Isn't this now double colour managing?
What should be the correct workflow to output a press-ready PDF? Also, is InDesign really any worse at performing the conversion than Photoshop? I would have assumed it was the same conversion engine throughout the Adobe suite.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.