Unashamedly newbie colour question...

[drewgraham]

I've googled and read and help-file-ed, but still can't get to grips with this.

I'm a marketing man, not a designer, but going freelance I've rather chucked myself in the deep end (always the best way to learn). I'm making a catalogue for a mail order plant business in Photoshop 7 / Quark 6.5 on a PC that was definately not meant for this kind of thing.

I know enough about printing from my non-freelance marketing days to know that what I give to the printers has got to be a pre-press standard, CMYK, font-embedded pdf. When I import a scanning (uncompressed TIFF) into PS i convert it to my working profile (Adobe RGB 1998), then convert the image to CMYK (Euroscale Coated v2) and tinker, then take it into Quark as a layered, uncompressed TIFF, where it appears completely different - as if (to my untrained eye) the colour saturation is too high. If I don't convert it and import it as RGB, it appears fine on my monitor (which is calibrated withn Adobe Gamma).

When I export / print to PDF from Quark, if I use CMYK as the colour space then it appears washed out and the colour is completely off when viewed with Acrobat Reader. If exported 'As Is' it appears fine, but something tells me if I'm having these issues, sending this to the printers wouldn't be a good idea.

I know this is a colour calibration issue, or possibly a PostScript printer driver issue, or even a GhostScript issue, but I'm lost.

Someone, save me from myself.