working in the UK and I want to know if its possible to add the ISO Coated v2 to the photoshop "custom cmyk" > ink colours dialogue? I want to control the total ink limit, etc. or indeed does anyone know the specs for that standard? i know it has a ink limit of 330 or 300 (depending on the version used) but what about dot gain, black generation, UCA, etc?
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The first doc is in German, it contains information about DotGain (but there is no need to characterize a complex ICC profile, actually the Tone Reproduction Curves, by a simple number, IMO): <http://www.fogra.org/products-de/icc/Readme04d.pdf>
What has it to do with CS4 and 64 bits? Is there any change for the handling of ICC profiles since CS2 ? Why don’t you use one of the many many available profiles ?
64-bit wasn’t so important in this case, which is true. force of habbit i’m afraid.
the reason i’m checking everything is thanks to Taz Tally who has a very indepth video tutorial on lynda.com. but it’s for the american press system.
also, I got a request from a printer to limit the total ink to 250% (postcards). I’m wondering how i can do that within photoshop/indesign/acrobat pro workflow?
you’re welcome. If you’re starting with an RGB image then use the profile as recommended by the printer (not good if he doesn’t know one). (IMO, for coated paper TIL 300% is normal). Under all circumstances – it’s not necessary to generate a new profile – there are enough published for all purposes.
If you’re starting already with a CMYK image then you can’t do much more than Convert to AdobeRGB, Edit a little, Convert to new CMYK space. Or convert directly and check the result.
The Custom (aka Obsolete) CMYK engine is not ICC compatible. And no, there haven’t been any changes to the Custom/Obsolete CMYK engine since about Photoshop 5.
Can you elaborate a little more about how Custom CMYK is obsolete? What do you mean that itΒs not ICC compatible and what features have Custom CMYK been replaced with?
To Peter’s original question: It’s always been confusing to many users who thought there might be a relationship between true ICC profiles and Custom CMYK when you find out there is no connection. Custom CMYK really is obsolete, as Chris should know, being an Adobe engineer. It would be great if Adobe included a real ICC profile editor ala the old Imation CFM, which did allow you to re-engineer the ink limits and black generation of existing ICC profiles. Until then, if you want to do it right, you’ll need to buy ProfileMaker , Monaco Profiler or some other profiling package that can read the data file from the profile in question and build a new profile with the parameters you need.
rydog – it is obsolete, period. The Custom CMYK engine produces low quality results, doesn’t take ICC profiles as input or a starting point. It’s Photoshop 2.5 technology that we barely keep working. There hasn’t been a replacement for CustomCMYK yet. I keep trying to get a replacement in the app, but as long as customers aren’t demanding it, product management points to other profiling apps and saying that’s good enough.
What about something like the Imation software. Did you ever use it or are you familiar with it.
Personally I have thousands of dollars in third party hardware and software and know how to use it, but so many do not and all too often the canned profiles are not adequate.
OK, I DEMAND it! Where the hell is it? Is it done yet?
Seriously, it would be better if this "barely…working" anachronism weren’t included at all. It leads users to believe that they can take an icc compliant profile and tweak it in Photoshop. The results can be acceptable but they are rarely stellar.
One of the problems is that there is at least one alpha tester who does want to remove Custom CMYK from Ps, but only as a vindictive jab at people who are still using it – sort of a way to punish them for not agreeing with his philosophy and force them into the twenty-first century.
Well, I don’t know how "vindictive" it is to try to dissuade them from using a "feature" that makes horrible separations. I think it would be a good idea to get rid of it. For some time, we were using custom CMYK, and not even aware that it wasn’t simply tweaking a starting point, but making a completely different separation with really poor shadows and no connection to the canned profiles provided. Only after getting burned did we do a little investigation and realized what was happening. It’s dangerous to leave in a feature like that without some kind of warning telling the user that a custom CMYK setting has no relation to any of the other included profiles.
Pfigen – well, we have had a lot of confused customers who think they are tweaking an ICC profile by using the ObsoleteCMYK engine (they wouldn’t let me rename it in the UI :-).
Folks at my job use it to generate black out of a job and place it into other colors to reduce registration problems on press. What would they use if not CustomCMYK to do this?
"It’s dangerous to leave in a feature like that without some kind of warning telling the user that a custom CMYK setting has no relation to any of the other included profiles. "
Even from the very beginning of ICC support in Ps 5, it was made clear when you read about it that Custom CMYK and the ICC dialog boxes had no relationship with each other. Unfortunately too many people thought they were connected and suggested that you could actually edit ICC profiles there. That caused a lot of confusion and some of that early misinformation persists today.
It’s not you can’t get pretty good results from Custom CMYK for some printing scenarios, because you can. It’s more that it has become less and less relevant as the ink definitions are from an era predating direct to plate, and there apparently there were a few half fixes to get it where it has been since it’s last revision.
Adding editing capabilities to Ps would probably solve the problems that force some to still use Custom CMYK for some purposes. As Rydog23 points out, there are still legitimate uses for this tool no matter how obsolete it may be. There are other uses too if you don’t happen to have access to Profilemaker or PrintOpen or something similar.
I knew it was creating an independent profile as it showed the exact same settings for each profile I was experimenting with. that’s why i was asking if there was a way to actually add it in there somehow.
it’s a real pity that it doesn’t work. if it is to be removed from PS, I would at least love to see some (non editable) stats about each profile in a "description" area just underneath. similar to what is in the custom cmyk dialogue. (dot gain,TBI etc)
also no one in europe actually uses the "euroscale" ….more so the "ISO Coated v2" as mentioned or the older "Fogra27", etc
It’s easy enough to figure the total ink limit and get a pretty good guess at the black generation characteristics of any of the canned profiles. The specific dot gain is a little more complicated as the dot gain arrived at from actual measurements of printed targets and are not as simple as "18% Dot Gain". You can read dot gain number in applications like ProfileMaker’s Profile Editor module.
