Colour Management |
| Shall I submit RGB or CMYK files? |
| Our recommendation is to work and save your files to RGB. In
Photoshop, Adobe RGB 1998 is the largest of the colour working
spaces and covers a wider colour gamut. Epson printers are actually
RGB based. CMYK information sent to an Epson printer goes through
an RGB conversion and then back again to CMYK for printing. If you are planning to submit a file created with Adobe Illustrator please save them as CMYK files. |
| Why then do most printers ask for CMYK files? |
| Ths goes back a bit to the days of litho offset printing, CMYK is the standard for commercial printing where colour separation plates had to be prepared. If you are preparing work to be sent to an offset printer to be printed as posters or brochures for example then you will need to save your work in CMYK. |
| What about sRGB? |
| sRGB is the default setting for hardware and software manufacturers.
Digital cameras and scanners are set to sRGB by default. It has
a much narrower colour gamut than the other RGB colour spaces and
is great if you are working on web images. If you are looking to
output your images to a broad range of print devices, you will
be limited in your range of colours. This section on colour management sRGB is a best practice guide. It does not mean that we will not be able to print sRGB images, in we find that many of the digital images submitted to us directly from digital cameras are saved as sRGB and the results are still good. Our recommedation to professional photographers and digital artists is to get into the habit of using Adobe RGB 1998 as their default colour space because of the benefit of a wider and richer colour space. As always it is good to experiment and familiarise yourself with the different colour spaces. |
| What about Photoshops Rendering Intent - Is that important? |
| Rendering Intents are the guidelines or rules that colour engines use to handle their gamut or range transformations. The 2 most commonly used in Photoshop are 'Perceptual' and 'Relative Colometric'. |
| How can I be sure that the colours you print are a true representation of my image? |
| This is a good question and probably the most difficult part of colour printing particularly when dealing with images that have been uploaded to our site and where we have no 'match' print. We do calibrate our monitors weekly and ensure that our screen to print profiles are reviewed on a monthly basis. We are accurate to about 98%. If colour matching is absolutely critical we can do one or two things. Work from a 'match' print, I.e a print that you are happy with produced on your own printer, or we will send you a test print for approval if required. A lot of our success comes from our experience in 'eyeballing' it. You can usually tell when a print does not look right. |