Colour: management or manglement?

[Robin Springall]

This is just bonkers: a flattened tiff looked different and printed out differently when placed in Illustrator CS2. By "different" I means when compared to being viewed on the same monitor and printed out on the same printer but from Photoshop. Both CS2 Mac.

The tiff had the standard Euroscale Coated v2 colour profile embedded, and both Photoshop and Illustrator were set up to that same working space, but the image went more yellow after being chucked into Frustrator. Oh, and it was the same whether I embedded it or linked it.

In the end I saved a copy of the tiff with no colour profile, turned off colour management in Illustrator, and it then looked and printed fine.

[Mike]

This is just bonkers: a flattened tiff looked different and printed out differently when placed in Illustrator CS2. By "different" I means when compared to being viewed on the same monitor and printed out on the same printer but from Photoshop. Both CS2 Mac.

The tiff had the standard Euroscale Coated v2 colour profile embedded, and both Photoshop and Illustrator were set up to that same working space, but the image went more yellow after being chucked into Frustrator. Oh, and it was the same whether I embedded it or linked it.

In the end I saved a copy of the tiff with no colour profile, turned off colour management in Illustrator, and it then looked and printed fine.

I do wish I could offer advice on colour management -- because that would probably mean I understood it myself. I've often found that the best colour is obtained by turning colour management off -- except for the times when it isn't.

[Cristen Gillespie]

I do wish I could offer advice on colour management -- because that would probably mean I understood it myself. I've often found that the best colour is obtained by turning colour management off -- except for the times when it isn't.

You've hit the nail on the head there. How many years of this and none of the solutions are?

[terrie]

Why is Illustrator always odd...'-}}

I've read in other forums that turning off cm in Illo is the way to go but it really makes no sense that you have to do that given you are using the CS2 version...

Terrie

[Robin Springall]

I'm starting to go (just mentally, for now) down the road of removing all colour profiles in our Adobe workflow. Just a thought.

My firm doesn't use colour manglement in Quark or Freehand, and CorelDraw has its own system which seems to work OK. The whole Adobe suite has a frightfully sophisticated CMM which seems good in theory, though we do experience loads of unexpected colour variations. We've worked out that if different docs in the same job have the same CMYK values but look different, there's a colour profile problem! Then what should we do about it?

In two recent CMYK cases (PC InDesign CS2), the CD booklet and inlay artwork was OK but the CD body looked way too red. I checked the tiffs from each doc in Photoshop, and the CMYK values were all the same. The tiffs used as part of the booklet and inlay were Euroscale Coated v2, but the CD body had a really odd ICC profile that I can't remember: converting it to Euroscale made no difference, and I could only get the three docs to match up by saving the tiffs with no profile, and setting ID to ignore incoming profiles. I didn't actually turn off colour management in ID, nor in Aggrobrat, so the press PDFs had the Euroscale Coated v2 profile that our printers seem to want, and the jobs printed fine (phew!)

As I said: nightmare.

[PeterArnel]

My boy - oh have a story to tell - and if only u had read what I sent u :-)
Peter

[terrie]

Robin....are your monitors calibrated???

Terrie

[PeterArnel]

Robin
I tease ( a bit ) - cant u book your self out for half a day and come down to Newbury - its not far - and see us ( we do put CD work out) They do a real bacon sandwich in the van across the road
Peter

[Rob Day]

This is just bonkers: a flattened tiff looked different and printed out differently when placed in Illustrator CS2. By "different" I means when compared to being viewed on the same monitor and printed out on the same printer but from Photoshop. Both CS2 Mac.


Robin, in a CMYK workflow the color mangement has already happened when you converted to CMYK using (presumably) the Euroscale profile in PS. Despite conventional wisdom, you don't need or want to embed a profile unless there needs to be further conversions (CMYK-to-CMYK) down the road, which you clearly don't want.

If the color is changing when you place a tagged file in ID then there is a profile conflict somewhere. Your ID CMYK working space might be the same Euroscale profile, but the document could have a different profile assigned (Edit>Assign Profiles) and that would override the working space. You could also look at your ID Proofing Setup, which would have to be set to Document CMYK to prevent a color shift.

Your solution of removing the embedded tags is in fact the way to go. In that case you still get a color managed preview of the color in ID, because the document's profile in ID (Euroscale in your case) drives the conversion of CMYK to RGB for an accurate display of both the ID and PS color.

Rob

[Robin Springall]

Robin, in a CMYK workflow the color mangement has already happened when you converted to CMYK using (presumably) the Euroscale profile in PS. Despite conventional wisdom, you don't need or want to embed a profile unless there needs to be further conversions (CMYK-to-CMYK) down the road, which you clearly don't want.Hello Rob, welcome to the DTP Forum! Yes, I'm coming round more and more to the idea that we should discard all colour profiles from images when importing them into the layout program. I might even try turning off colour management completely in the CS2 suite apart from Aggro-- sorry, Acrobat. Possibly, but not sure.

Saint Peter of Arnel <gg> here is bang up-to-date and has adopted the new Europe ISO Coated FOGRA27 working space but both our printers want to stay with Euroscale Coated v2, so I guess our PDFs have to have the ECv2 profile.

[Robin Springall]

It's about time I finally got to meet you, isn't it? How you fixed Monday or Tuesday? I can't do anything later in the week, coz it's the year end. Give us a call at t'mill 020 8960 7222 and let's set something up.

[Rob Day]

I don't think you really need to turn it "off"—there always has to be an assumption of what the RGB and CMYK spaces are, so if you use the Color Management Off setting in Adobe apps all your really doing is setting your color management profiles to Monitor RGB and US Web Coated SWOP, which I don't think you want in europe.

On the other hand, if you set your CMYK Policy setting to Off then new documents won't get tagged and ID will ignore incoming tags (with the exception of placed PDFs). In that case you can have CM on and your Euroscale working space will mange the conversion to RGB for the display—you just have to be aware that changing the CMYK working space gives a different preview of CMYK colors. With your policy set to off, CMYK-to-CMYK conversions are very unlikely. I also never tag anything going out for output, even PDF, because without a source profile there isn't much choice but to print the CMYK values that are in the file.

[PeterArnel]

there isn't much choice but to print the CMYK values that are in the file.
Rob I am not sure about this - I think what happens is that when we have untagged images the get the profile added as it goes through my rip - which up until recently was set to SWOP and not ISO Coated (Euroscale) is not a standard in Europe
Peter
It may be with Robins job - it was just not have been printed to the right colour - it does happen and magenta is a real problem

[Robin Springall]

magenta is a real problemCrikey, you're not kidding! Magenta goes all over the place, given half a chance.

Rob - thanks for the tips. I'll keep at it.