It’s because your images are CMYK and the Windows P&F viewer converts those formats it’s able to view into some form of RGB (Paint may do the same thing), thus making your CMYK images look awful. I don’t remember if this went away if there was no embedded color profile or not, but I do remember this always happened to me with exported images from Illy some years ago (CS1).
If your client is printing from the Windows P&F viewer of some similar program that converts any image to RGB, that would be why they look bad there, too. The same would occur if they are viewing and saving them in the Win P&F viewer. At that point, it doesn’t matter where they print it from as the color damage has already been done.
Awesome! Thanks so much for the reply. So, what will happen when my client sends these images to the printer? Will a four-color offset printer print the images correctly?
So long as your file remains unaltered, 4C offset printing should be fine. They should okay a proof, though, and preferably a contract proof if it’s a physically large print or high volume.
I can’t stress enough the "unaltered" part, though. If you are emailing them the file, tell them to save the file from the email program directly to their hard drive and any viewing of the file should not include a saving of the file from the viewing application as this will alter the color profile (and therefore appearance) of the file. Any "saving" of the file must only be as a transfer from one place to another (ie: email to HD, FTP server to local network, whatever).
Awesome, awesome, awesome. Thanks so much. For a second, I was terrified that I irrevocably screwed something up and would have to recolor all of the images.
Just out of morbid curiosity, why is the automatic conversion from CMYK to RGB in these other applications so much less dramatic with, say a JPEG file than it is with a TIFF?
JPEGs are primarily for viewing on screen and screen colors are RGB; think of it as native support. JPEGs can be CMYK but those cannot be viewed by web programs (at least any I’m aware of). TIFFs can pretty much be any color set there is and they are uncompressed where JPEGs are compressed. There’s more to that, but it would take someone smarter than me to explain (and know) it all.
The Win P&F viewer and Paint and the like are meant for viewing/creating/cut or copy and pasting images for screen viewing so they work better with file types of that nature (JPEG, GIF, BMP, etc.) regardless of color profile or mode, although they prefer some form of RGB (and will make it that way if it isn’t). And TIFFs are really meant for print use so the Win P&F-ers of the world don’t do well with them especially when they are in a non-screen viewing color mode. Again, there’s more to that, but that’s pretty much the gist of it.
Hmmm. You learn something new every day!
I learned it the hard way. We had a third member of our department for less than a year but when I would email her TIFs of product photos I’d taken for use in catalogs, etc., she would double click them from Outlook which would open them in Win P&F viewer and then she’d save them from there to their designated folders.
I couldn’t figure out why these CMYK images I was sending her were showing up as RGB during preflight until I emailed her a sample and watched her save it. My heart sunk when I found out what that did and how often she did it (always). She’d place the images in ID and see that they were RGB and do nothing about it. I was stunned.
I didn’t always email her images (most of the time it was via flash drive, but I found out she saved some photos from there the same way) but wound up basically supervising her transfer of images from that point on.
After she left, it took me nearly four months to do my job and find and fix all the mistakes she made during her stay here. That particular images thing (RGB isn’t for print) was just one of many things she didn’t know that I figured a college grad in the field would know. What I do is not complicated but it does require basic knowledge… what are they teaching these kids?
Hmmm. You learn something new every day!
That’s why I subscribe to this forum, man! I learn GOBS from this place (don’t know what a gob is, but…) and every once in a while I’m able to contribute.
"JPEGs are primarily for viewing on screen and screen colors are RGB; think of it as native support. JPEGs can be CMYK but those cannot be viewed by web programs (at least any I’m aware of). TIFFs can pretty much be any color set there is and they are uncompressed where JPEGs are compressed. There’s more to that, but it would take someone smarter than me to explain (and know) it all. "
Safari seems to display CMYK jpegs just fine. Even RGB jpegs need to have embedded profiles to display correctly in any application. Safari and Firefox are the only two I know of for Windows. Tiffs can be uncompressed but may also be compressed RGB, CMYK or Lab color with LZW or ZIP lossless compression, which may or may not create it’s own problem with other applications. Tiffs and also be compressed using jpeg compression, which, is, of course, lossy, but almost no one uses that on tiffs. Jpegs are always compressed in a lossy compression, but it’s only an issue when the quality setting is too low and visible artifacts occur.
