[...]The CaffiNation Podcast » Better Photo Printing RGB v CMYK[...]…

I work as support for a university architecture program and we have had more success converting and attempting to work in CMYK during the creation of the document as opposed to color profiles. I am however open to suggestions and will gladly give it a shot. in the past we have gotten truer to screen output by working in CMYK, the wider gamut of rgb is nice but when converting to RGB at print time we have seen too many errors in converting the colors, noticeably a purple shift in blues and a mustard tone to skin tones.

Thanks for listening and the commentary! I’ll let you know if it works out better doing it your way!

I would rather advice to use RGB images with a color profile attached which covers a big spectrum (Like Adobe RGB), while useing a printer-profile made specifically for your printer.

The reason for this is that if you do a RGB-CMYK conversion with just any CMYK target profile (like the ones that come with photoshop), it might be that the target profile covers less colors than your printer can actually handle, which is a shame I’d say.

On top of that, a printer might be set to convert colors to it’s own profile (meaning it’s going to convert from CMYK profile A to CMYK profile B), which is another loss of precision/color.

On the other hand, if you use RGB in your applications, you usually have a broader range of colors in your picture than your printer can handle anyway. So printing from an RGB image doing the CMYK conversion driver-automated at print-time (to your printer-specific profile) will always get the most out of your printers possible color range.

Off course, your printer-driver has to support this. If it’s not the case, you can let Photoshop do the conversion at print-time, again useing a printer specific profile.

Hope this might be of help to you, I’ve always worked this way on my daily job on a repro-company. And my apologies if my English isn’t the best around, it’s not my native language.