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Author Topic: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?  (Read 11351 times)

Josh-H

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Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« on: March 01, 2011, 05:21:53 am »

I need to supply a client with a dozen images for print in their magazine and I just realised they want them at 300 ppi 8 bits in CMYK as Tiffs.

Can lightroom actually export files in CMYK? I'm a novice when it comes to CMYK (Or as I 'think' am I going to have to do this from Photoshop).

I was planing to export the files form Lightroom at 300 dpi tiffs in pro-photo and then convert them in PS with 'convert to profile'. This will give them a CMYK file in 16 bit.

Any gotchas to be aware of?

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eliedinur

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2011, 07:28:53 am »

Lightroom doesn't do CMYK. You will have to go into PS.

Ask your client for more info about image size, because only specifying 300 ppi isn't enough. It's like telling you to get in your car and drive at 60 mph. How long? How far? Get either pixel dimensions or print (layout) dimensions. And ask them which CMYK profile. There are dozens.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2011, 07:30:55 am by elied »
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Ken Bennett

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2011, 07:45:11 am »

Ask your client for more info about image size, because only specifying 300 ppi isn't enough. It's like telling you to get in your car and drive at 60 mph. How long? How far? Get either pixel dimensions or print (layout) dimensions. And ask them which CMYK profile. There are dozens.


Absolutely correct. At the very least, you need to know the basic press conditions -- web or sheet fed, coated or uncoated paper. If they can tell you that, you can use Convert to Profile in Photoshop, choose the appropriate profile (eg., U.S. Sheetfed Coated v2) as the Destination Space, and Relative Colormetric (or possibly Perceptual) as the rendering intent. Provide the full native file -- the pixel dimensions that came from your camera -- and set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. (You can choose this when you export the file to Photoshop.)

(If they can't tell you the press conditions, you can't provide a CMYK conversion. You just can't. Provide a file in the sRGB color space and let them have their press people do the conversion. sRGB because that's the color space least likely to get screwed up by idiots.)
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Josh-H

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2011, 07:29:55 pm »

Thanks. I was able to extract only one piece more of information from them and that was to size the images at 8 inches on the long edge.

Requests for their colour management practices drew a big proverbial 'blank'. So they are getting SRGB images.
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #4 on: March 01, 2011, 10:07:18 pm »

You might find this article by Jeff Schewe useful:

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/phscs2ip_reproprep.pdf

Nick Rains

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #5 on: March 01, 2011, 10:56:09 pm »

Lightroom doesn't do CMYK. You will have to go into PS.

True but you can define a Post Process action at the end of the LR export dialogue box and set up a simple mode change action in PS. Saves a lot of time.
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john beardsworth

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #6 on: March 02, 2011, 04:22:23 am »

True but you can define a Post Process action at the end of the LR export dialogue box and set up a simple mode change action in PS. Saves a lot of time.

You'd save the action as a droplet, and put the droplet in the Export Actions folder. Alternatively you might set the droplet as an external editor if you do a lot of this.

John
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Ken Bennett

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Re: Exporting Images in CMYK - Any advice?
« Reply #7 on: March 02, 2011, 07:47:59 am »

True but you can define a Post Process action at the end of the LR export dialogue box and set up a simple mode change action in PS. Saves a lot of time.

Do you mean "Image > Mode > CMYK" ?? Not the best way to make a CMYK conversion. You could create a droplet that does a Convert to Profile to the proper CMYK space, but only if you know what that space is (the press conditions.) The O.P. has not, as far as I can tell, been able to get that information from the client.
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