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kaylees00
Participant
June 12, 2020
Answered

How to keep vibrancy of colors when converting from RGB to CMYK in pdf?

  • June 12, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 16035 views

Hi!

So, I'm trying to print some pdf documents that I was given, and I discovered that they were using an RGB color profile instead of CMYK. For the majority of the documents, the colors look the same when I convert them, but for some of the documents that have some more vibrant colors (a very vibrant blue), they become much duller. I've been using this tutorial from Adobe on how to convert RGB to CMYK but I don't see anything on maintaining vibrancy: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/color-conversion-ink-management-acrobat.html 

Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you!

Correct answer Dov Isaacs

The real problem is that the gamut (i.e., range of colors) supported by typical printing CMYK color spaces is much smaller than the range of RGB colors that you can see on a computer monitor. Examples of such colors are the bright blues and bright greens you often see in office graphics. Ultimately, if you really need to maintain such vibrancy of colors, you must end of with a n-color printing process, CMYK plus additional colorants (bright green and orange, for example). Typically for such printing, you keep the colors in an ICC color managed workspace and let the printer's RIP do the color conversions as necessary to the n-colors.

 

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov IsaacsCorrect answer
Legend
June 12, 2020

The real problem is that the gamut (i.e., range of colors) supported by typical printing CMYK color spaces is much smaller than the range of RGB colors that you can see on a computer monitor. Examples of such colors are the bright blues and bright greens you often see in office graphics. Ultimately, if you really need to maintain such vibrancy of colors, you must end of with a n-color printing process, CMYK plus additional colorants (bright green and orange, for example). Typically for such printing, you keep the colors in an ICC color managed workspace and let the printer's RIP do the color conversions as necessary to the n-colors.

 

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    K
    kaylees00Author
    Participant
    June 12, 2020

    Ok, thank you for responding!

    So, with these documents is there any way to put the colors in an ICC color profile in Acrobat, so that the printing job maintains vibrancy?

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    June 13, 2020

    Please re-read my response. The problem is that standard CMYK printing simply cannot reproduce those intense colors! Sorry!

     

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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