I am preparing couple of images for offset printing to make a coffee table book and I am confused about some issues and will appreciate if anyone can help:
1) My images are all 35mm velvia slides. Can I use Camera Raw to process them? Is this program good only for digital capture? I am finding great use of this little yet very powerful program.
2) Images were scanned through drum scanner and they use CMYK color profile, I converted them to ProPhoto in Camera Raw during the process, and after the editing both in ACR & PS, I convert them again to RGB as final image before I send them to the press. Is there any problem in doing this?
For (1), the short answer is no. Camera RAW is to convert a bunch of raw numbers from the sensor of a camera to something an image editting program can understand. To convert a transparency to a digital file, this is already done for you in the scanning software.
For (2), something sound a bit odd there. I really don't think that you can edit a scan in ACR, at least in a normal workflow. Lightroom, yes. PS, yes. The only thing I might change is the last conversion to RGB - ask the printers what profile they would like as they might want Adobe RGB or be able to work in ProPhoto and do be more comfortable doing the conversion themselves. .
Mohsen, I recommend you consult the book publisher/printer before doing any CMYK color/toning adjustment yourself. Many high-quality book publisher/printers want to do the RGB-to-CMYK conversion and adjustments themselves because it's a touchy color space to use and settings will vary from operation to operation and press to press.
Generally, the slides should be scanned RGB and the digital files given to the printing company for CMYK conversion. Since your slides were scanned and rendered in CMYK from the outset, there's no conversion that needs to be done, but you should talk to the publisher/printer to find out how to proceed. I'd be surprised if they want a large group of contributing photographers each to do the CMYK adjustments themselves, because it's a likely recipe for inconsistent color throughout the book.
Some publishers/printers don't mind if you do the CMYK adjustments yourself. Some do. Best to check with them.
FYI for next time: Typical workflow is to scan the slides RGB, tone them to your satisfaction on a calibrated monitor in RGB, make a sample print for each image and deliver the toned RGB TIFF files and sample prints to the publisher/printer for CMYK conversion and final adjustment.
Now you can change them to Jpegs using a batch process, then open them up in Camera raw and process. Then save the finals as tiffs.
Second thing, for offset printing, usually they are printing in cmyk, not RGB. So I would process them, then convert them over to cmyk, and make any final adjustments. I work for a printing company, and nothing we do offset wise is RGB, only cmyk.
I don't see anything wrong with opening the scans in ACR if it works for you. As Dan said, that's not typical, or what ACR is really meant for, but I've used it on JPGs before, and it does some nice things. I'm assuming you've already worked out with your publisher that they want RGB files (to do the CMYK conversion themselves)? If so, then your work flow sounds fine to me, as long as your conversion from CMYK to RGB goes OK and doesn't do anything weird with your color.
as long as your conversion from CMYK to RGB goes OK and doesn't do anything weird with your color.
I've seen it do weird things sometimes, not all the time. Since the scans were performed in CMYK, if the publisher/printer wants the photographer to do the toning, I'd leave them in CMYK so no conversion of any type is necessary.
But Steve, odds are CMYK from the scan wouldn't match CMYK that the publisher wants. That's probably why they'd want RGB. CMYK is poorly defined, and isn't really a color space like sRGB or Adobe RGB. That's what causes headaches in translation - it's possible to have very different CMYK realizations of the same RGB image. It's very device dependent too - so unless the scanner CMYK was somehow calibrated to the printer CMYK, things would still need to be converted.
Before the scanner specialist did the scan I asked him that I prefer all the slides to be scanned in RGB because RGB has more color gamut and that converting them to CMYK before they go to the press will be easy. But he insisted that scanning them as CMYK is better and that he used to scan this way and I am the first to ask him such thing. He recommended CMYK. I requested from him to scan one image twice one as CMYK and another as RGB for me to compare. I found that no big difference except for file size; CMYK image has more MB compared RGB.
My workflow for retouching the images is as follow:
1) I open images in adobe camera raw (a message open telling me that ACR will convert the image to RGB, I agree).
2) I make my edit
3) I then send the image as 16bit, ProRGB, original resolution
4) I open the file in PS, make very small edits mainly color & curve
5) flatten all layers & save the file as Tiff with ProRGB as color space
6) finally, I adjust image size for book layout size, run Photokit Sharpner
Please if this workflow is not ok point that out. I already completed half of those 180 images
David, excellent points. I'd forgotten about that. My issue is that I've seen some very weird color shifts happen when converting from CMYK to RGB and back to CMYK, which is why in my experience the slides should be scanned in RGB and left there for the on-site experts to convert.
But that seems to be water under the bridge now, with Mohsen half done with the images going to the publisher/printer. And one of my other issues also disappears. By the wording of the original post, it appeared to me that there were a number of different photographers contributing to the book, which, if each was doing his/her own conversion, could have led to big headaches in color variation.
But if Mohsen has 180 images for the book it sounds like the book is all his work, and the inconsistency in color I assumed initially wouldn't be an issue.
Mohsen, if you haven't already, I'd contact the publisher/printer, explain that the images were drum scanned in CMYK and converted by you to RGB and ask them if that's OK. But maybe you've already done that, and then I am just creating problems for you where there are none.
Steve Foss above has really good advice about talking with the printer. Also, Mike Horn is correct in that offset printing uses four colors, CMYK.
My first wife was a journalist who worked in a marketing department of a large corporation. When she got the color separations for ads, I was amazed to find out that all 4 camera ready color separations were in BLACK AND WHITE.
Moral is that you may tweak the colors to your satisfaction in RGB or CMYK, but the real tweaking is done after the final color separation when ready for the press. The good news is that the presses are fairly well calibrated which is why one may see color bars on the pages before they are trimmed.
Nevertheless, talk with the printer/publisher before doing a lot of work. Find out how you can proof the colors before printing. Otherwise, you may be wasting a lot of your valuable time.
Discussion
9 repliesI am preparing couple of images for offset printing to make a coffee table book and I am confused about some issues and will appreciate if anyone can help:
1) My images are all 35mm velvia slides. Can I use Camera Raw to process them? Is this program good only for digital capture? I am finding great use of this little yet very powerful program.
2) Images were scanned through drum scanner and they use CMYK color profile, I converted them to ProPhoto in Camera Raw during the process, and after the editing both in ACR & PS, I convert them again to RGB as final image before I send them to the press. Is there any problem in doing this?
Thanks
For (2), something sound a bit odd there. I really don't think that you can edit a scan in ACR, at least in a normal workflow. Lightroom, yes. PS, yes. The only thing I might change is the last conversion to RGB - ask the printers what profile they would like as they might want Adobe RGB or be able to work in ProPhoto and do be more comfortable doing the conversion themselves. .
Generally, the slides should be scanned RGB and the digital files given to the printing company for CMYK conversion. Since your slides were scanned and rendered in CMYK from the outset, there's no conversion that needs to be done, but you should talk to the publisher/printer to find out how to proceed. I'd be surprised if they want a large group of contributing photographers each to do the CMYK adjustments themselves, because it's a likely recipe for inconsistent color throughout the book.
Some publishers/printers don't mind if you do the CMYK adjustments yourself. Some do. Best to check with them.
FYI for next time: Typical workflow is to scan the slides RGB, tone them to your satisfaction on a calibrated monitor in RGB, make a sample print for each image and deliver the toned RGB TIFF files and sample prints to the publisher/printer for CMYK conversion and final adjustment.
Second thing, for offset printing, usually they are printing in cmyk, not RGB. So I would process them, then convert them over to cmyk, and make any final adjustments. I work for a printing company, and nothing we do offset wise is RGB, only cmyk.
**steve replied before I did. :)
I've seen it do weird things sometimes, not all the time. Since the scans were performed in CMYK, if the publisher/printer wants the photographer to do the toning, I'd leave them in CMYK so no conversion of any type is necessary.
My workflow for retouching the images is as follow:
1) I open images in adobe camera raw (a message open telling me that ACR will convert the image to RGB, I agree).
2) I make my edit
3) I then send the image as 16bit, ProRGB, original resolution
4) I open the file in PS, make very small edits mainly color & curve
5) flatten all layers & save the file as Tiff with ProRGB as color space
6) finally, I adjust image size for book layout size, run Photokit Sharpner
Please if this workflow is not ok point that out. I already completed half of those 180 images
But that seems to be water under the bridge now, with Mohsen half done with the images going to the publisher/printer. And one of my other issues also disappears. By the wording of the original post, it appeared to me that there were a number of different photographers contributing to the book, which, if each was doing his/her own conversion, could have led to big headaches in color variation.
But if Mohsen has 180 images for the book it sounds like the book is all his work, and the inconsistency in color I assumed initially wouldn't be an issue.
Mohsen, if you haven't already, I'd contact the publisher/printer, explain that the images were drum scanned in CMYK and converted by you to RGB and ask them if that's OK. But maybe you've already done that, and then I am just creating problems for you where there are none.
My first wife was a journalist who worked in a marketing department of a large corporation. When she got the color separations for ads, I was amazed to find out that all 4 camera ready color separations were in BLACK AND WHITE.
Moral is that you may tweak the colors to your satisfaction in RGB or CMYK, but the real tweaking is done after the final color separation when ready for the press. The good news is that the presses are fairly well calibrated which is why one may see color bars on the pages before they are trimmed.
Nevertheless, talk with the printer/publisher before doing a lot of work. Find out how you can proof the colors before printing. Otherwise, you may be wasting a lot of your valuable time.