On Wednesday 22 February 2006 03:26, Sven Neumann wrote: > Hi, > > "John R. Culleton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I am evaluating two products to use while waiting for Gimp to > > adopt the CMYK color model, Scribus and Krita (part of Koffice). > > Scribus is really a Quark replacement and Krita (inspired in part > > by Gimp is still in an early stage. The Krita manual says it will > > do CMYK but my copy doesn't have it yet. It is however very > > Gimp-ish in look and feel. > > I hope you are aware that using the CMYK color model is not going to > solve your print problems. Actually for most image manipulation needs > your source images will be in an RGB color space and it is then > recommended to do all the work in RGB and to let the printer driver > care about the rest.
Printers often specify CMYK color model for finished color work sent to them in either pdf or tiff format. And the color shift caused by the lower gamut of CMYK can be serious, especially where flesh tones are concerned. Obviously what is seen on screen is presented in RGB. but if it starts from a CMYK base image then the CMYK color gamut will be properly presented. It is a proper subset of RGB. I understand that major surgery needed to bring Gimp up to the capabilities of e.g., Photoshop in the CMYK area. But the fact remains this lack of CMYK and also ICC color profiles puts Gimp at a disadvantage to other programs where printing is concerned. Let me quote from a recent book, "Book Design and Production", by Pete Masterson: "For professional designers, [Photoshop] Elements is crippled by not being able to work in the CMYK color space---a requirement if you are preparing color artwork for printing." Or as my own father used to say "Don't fight the problem." The problem is that most printers expect or demand CMYK. Either you produce artwork in CMYK model to start with or you prepare it in RGB and then convert it---and hope. Perhaps command or plugin titled as "use CMYK gamut" could convert a Gimp image to the gamut of CMYK but leave it in RGB. Each RGB tone would be converted to the nearest CMYK equvalent. Is this possible? That feature would give the user an idea of what the printed output would look like while leaving the base image in a more limited version of RGB color space. A table of named colors used in a document, expressd in CMYK notation and in RGB notation, is embedded in every sla file produced by Scribus. Scribus sla files are in plain text XML format. If you like I can send you a sample. If not, not. -- John Culleton _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
