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ancap7128088
Participant
July 16, 2020
Answered

Color proofing not working inside Phosotshop

  • July 16, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1392 views

Hello! I made an illustration in Photoshop CC 2019 and i want to use it digitally but also print it, and see how the colors shift in that case. The problem is that when i check the Proof Colors option with the CMYK proof setup, or even when i change the color mode from rgb to cmyk inside Photoshop, nothing seems to change. The shift in color (which in my case is very bad) is only visible outside Photoshop, when i save it as tiff for print. I was very careful with not using out-of-gammut colors, but still.

 

Please, does anyone know if there's a way i could make the Proof colors work inside photoshop, so i can check the shift in real time? Thanks!

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer D Fosse

That's right. Very few, if any, consumer-grade image viewers support CMYK at all. They may display the file, but with completely unpredictable colors.

 

As long as you proof to the correct CMYK profile, the one that corresponds to the actual print process, Photoshop will give you a reliable preview. And if you don't have any out-of-gamut colors, you won't see any difference at all. That means everything is good to go.

 

 

3 replies

davescm
Community Expert
davescmCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 16, 2020

One thing to add - if you are printing on an inkjet printer, using the printer driver as opposed to a RIP, you should not be going near CMYK anyway. Printer drivers are designed to take RGB input and convert to their inkset which is often CMYK + other colours internally. To proof, just set proof to the printer and paper profile that you are using to print.

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    July 16, 2020

    That's right. Very few, if any, consumer-grade image viewers support CMYK at all. They may display the file, but with completely unpredictable colors.

     

    As long as you proof to the correct CMYK profile, the one that corresponds to the actual print process, Photoshop will give you a reliable preview. And if you don't have any out-of-gamut colors, you won't see any difference at all. That means everything is good to go.

     

     

      A
      ancap7128088Author
      Participant
      July 16, 2020

      Great, thank you for your answer! It saved me a lot of useless headaches in the future!

      Mylenium
      Mylenium
      Legend
      July 16, 2020

      You have a wrong understanding of how this works. The fact of the matter is that outside PS most programs can't deal with CMYK encoded images, hence they display them wrongly. This isn't a suitable way to verify your output. So technically, assuming you used all the right options in PS, your images should be print-proof. The hang-up here, however, is that I can see nothing in your description that indicates whether you are actually working on a calibrated system. Even if you set up a proofing based on teh standard profiles, your colors may still be wrong if you didn't actualyl calibrate your monitor. that may also explain, why you don't see much of a difference switching modes. You may simply have tweaked your colors to be within generic RGB ranges. That could still be okay for what you intend on doing, but it's really not clear what you actually did here. providing the exact settings might clarify matters.

       

      Mylenium

        A
        ancap7128088Author
        Participant
        July 16, 2020

        Oh, you're right, the fact that outside PS most programs can't deal with CMYK encoded images didn't occur to me. Thank you so much for your thorough answer! I really appreciate it.

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