How do I export a file with a CMYK color profile in Lightroom?

Fast forward to 2023.  Business card printers for example all seem to want a photo file uploaded in CMYK which is a problem for me to get the conversion to look right in PS CC.  Check Vista print who is possibly the largest business card service in the USA.  They want my file in CMYK color.  As a test, I sent them an aRGB file and the color on the cards was not good at all.

(This is how I guess it works but Im only guessing so please tell me whether my logic is right or not)

But if your printer company has told you that it uses a particular CMYK profile (such as FOGRA27 Coated that my print company uses) shouldnt you always use that, and if they havent shoudn't told you you use PhotoProRGB instead of sRGB ?

For example if you are working on a file in Lightroom and you do a SoftProof to sRGB and it shows lots of out of gamut colours, then you do a soft proof to the particular CMYK profile and it shows less and different out of gamaut colours ( i have plenty of files like this). If you now export the file as sRGB its going to have to clip/modify those colours that were invalid for sRGB even if they are fine for CMYK. Then when the printer company converts the sRGB profile to a CMYK profile it has already has some incorrect colours and the problem will worsen when you then convert to CMYK to deal with the colours that the CMYK cannot handle. These colours may not even be the colours that were shown out of gamout when you SoftProofed to CMYK initially because the conversion to sRGB wil have converted the colours that sRGB couldnt handle so when map back to LAB the colours will not be  the same as the original image. You could get round this by modifying the image so it doesnt show any out of gamout colours but you would have to modify it so it doesnt have out of gamout for not just the CMYK profile but also the sRGB profile even though the sRGB profile is not being used for printing! Additionally export as a CMYK profile will allow you to decide whether to use Perceptual or Relative conversion, you dont have this control if the printer company does the conversion (but to export as CMYK you will have to open the image in Photoshop and do it from there, although you can softproof CMYK profiles in LR6 you cant export with a CMYK profile)

Alternatively if they haven't told yo how they would print by all means softproof to sRGB and make some adjustments to improve the chances of a good print. But wouldnt it be better to embed the a ProPhotoRGB as this will always better represent the colours in the original image allowing the printer company to do a better job of converting the print to whatever method they use. The only disadvantage to this method is you would have to export as a 16bit tif rather than 8bit jpeg because 8bits is not enough bytes to properly represent the PhotoPro colour profile.

It seems the point has been hammered well down by now, so I'll just sum it up: CMYK is a can of worms. Don't open it unless it's absolutely necessary.

In addition, CMYK is very much dependent on geography. Here in Europe, most commonly used are either ISO Coated (eci) 300%, or Coated FOGRA39. SWOP isn't used anywhere, and the Photoshop default is probably responsible for more bad color here than anything else. People just hit Image Mode > CMYK without any idea what they're doing.

ISO Coated isn't even in the Photoshop installation, you have to download it. But it's not bad as CMYK goes. It's pretty wide gamut, and you need Adobe RGB (and a wide gamut monitor) to cover it.

There is no need to convert to CMYK anymore today. In InDesign and other print application you should place RGB images.

See also Re: Re: Converting Images to CMYK for Print Publication

ray7199 wrote: I'm trying to save a photo with a CMYK color profile to send to a company who will print it for me. I've looked at the color profiles installed on my computer, and quite a few CMYK profiles appear to be there (in   /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/Recommended).

Above and beyond what Jeff and John have told you, be VERY careful converting RGB to CMYK unless you have the specific ICC profile for that print provider. Probably a lot safer to send them tagged RGB and let them convert the data. Converting with a profile that isn't specifically targeted for the print process will produce huge headache's for you and the shop and potentially awful output which is going to be expensive. Ask them if they can accept RGB and send them maybe sRGB which of course you can do from Lightroom.

Following on from Jeff's comment, create a Photoshop droplet and run it as a post processing step. Instructions here.