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Color profiles - must they all be identical?

Explorer ,
Oct 24, 2023 Oct 24, 2023

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I'm designing a book that will include 100 TIFFs of an artist's paintings. I've plowed through all the images to set them to the same dpi for starters, and noticed there's some variety in their color profiles. Most are either Adobe RGB (1998) or ProPhoto RGB (those two in equal measure) - but there are also about a dozen in other profiles: "Display P3", "sd", "Adobe 98", "prophoto".

 

All TIFFs have their color profiles embedded. My inDesign doc is set to Preserve Embedded Profiles.

 

Is there a problem placing images with different profiles into a single inDesign doc? If so, what's the best solution?

 

I'm running Ventura 13.6 on a MacBook Pro - InDesign 18.5 and PhotoShop 25.0.0.

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Performance , Print

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Community Expert ,
Oct 24, 2023 Oct 24, 2023

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No, they don't all have to be the same.

But I like to do so, and set up a Color Management Method colorspace that already matches the embedded colorspace profile of pix that come through Photoshop. I make it a workflow habit to edit and save all images in Photoshop so that they have the same colorspace icc profile embedded within them.

I also make that same icc color profile choice for color management in InDesign. Keeping the workflow in the same colorspace through to next to last step cuts down on translations. The one big translation happens when exporting to PDF for prepress.

Mike Witherell

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Community Expert ,
Oct 25, 2023 Oct 25, 2023

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Hi @kathleend82868475 , Also, are all of the images RGB? Mixing profiles for CMYK images means there will be some CMYK-to-CMYK conversions at output, which is never ideal and can cause problems. All RGB images will eventually get converted into the final print space, so as long as they include an embedded profile, the conversion will be color managed.

 

If you are color correcting the TIFFs, there is a strong argument for converting all of the RGB images into a single large gamut RGB editing space before making the edits. The problem with mixing small gamut display spaces like sRGB or even Display P3 is they "clip" a significant portion of the typical CMYK output space—a large portion of the CMYK blue/green spectrum can be outside of a small RGB space’s gamut. If you are editing in a space like sRGB, you can’t get at a saturated color like 100% cyan. In any case it is important to embed the RGB profile—images with no embedded profile will be listed as DocumentRGB in InDesign’s Link Info panel.

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Explorer ,
Oct 25, 2023 Oct 25, 2023

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Yes, all images arrived as RGB, so no problem with CMYK conversions. And I don't plan on doing any color corrections, but that will depend on the client once she sees how the ink lands on the paper.

 

Please clarify the small vs. large gamut display space - are Adobe RGB (1998) and ProPhoto RGB large gamut spaces?

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Community Expert ,
Oct 25, 2023 Oct 25, 2023

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Both are very large in comparison to any CMYK ink colorspaces.

Mike Witherell

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Community Expert ,
Oct 25, 2023 Oct 25, 2023

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are Adobe RGB (1998) and ProPhoto RGB large gamut spaces?

 

Yes.

 

The problem with monitor RGB spaces is, there are significant parts of the print color spectrum that can’t be displayed. In the 90s RGB spaces designed for editing for print were developed—the entire CMYK color gamut is contained by an RGB space like ProPhoto, but not by most monitor RGB spaces like sRGB.

 

Apple‘s Color Sync Utility lets you compare the 3D plot color spaces. When you compare sRGB with a typical coated offset CMYK profile the problem is clear. This is the 3D plot of sRGB which is similar to most standard RGB displays:

 

Screen Shot 74.pngexpand image

 

And this is sRGB compared to Coated GRACoL 2013 a common press profile.

 

You can see that there is a large chunk of CMYK color that is outside of the sRGB space. There‘s no color correction you can make to an sRGB profiled image that would convert to the GRACoL colors outside of the sRGB gamut:

 

Screen Shot 73.pngexpand image

 

GRACoL is almost fully contained in the ProPhoto RGB space, so editing in ProPhotoRGB I could make a color correction based on the CMYK output numbers, that would convert to the more saturated blues and yellows available in the GRACoL space. Here is ProPhoto RGB compared to Coated GRACoL

 

Screen Shot 76.pngexpand image

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Community Expert ,
Oct 25, 2023 Oct 25, 2023

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Also, AdobeRGB is not as large as ProPhoto RGB, so it can still "clip" some CMYK color depending on the destination CMYK space. Here’s Adobe RGB.

 

Screen Shot 77.pngexpand image

 

And AdobeRGB compared to Coated Fogra39.

 

Screen Shot 78.pngexpand image

 

It’s usually assumed that RGB spaces are always larger than CMYK spaces, but thay typically intersect—some color can be printed but not displayed,, and some color can be displayed but not printed

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Explorer ,
Oct 25, 2023 Oct 25, 2023

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Thank you so much - a trove of information here, and it explains a couple problems I've run into before with color correction. The visuals help a lot.

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