On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Jon Cruz <jon@...18...> wrote:
On Dec 19, 2009, at 2:42 PM, Chris Mohler wrote:
Illustrator (these days) handles this in a sane way IMO. There is a switch for the Document Color Mode - RGB or CMYK. When selecting/creating a color in RGB mode, RGB sliders are presented and vice versa in CMYK mode (actually, you can use any sliders in any mode
- it just gets converted on the fly to match the doc's color mode -
but not really on-topic). What makes this sane to me is that you never end up with a mix of RGB and CMYK in the same document - which can be a nightmare when getting ready for final output.
Actually... the insane part of that behavior is that CMYK=>RGB is a *lossy* conversion, and automatically doing it means that artists have their reason for using CMYK in the first place squashed/deleted.
Well, I set my doc to CMYK mode and I'm 100% sure all colors are in CMYK. That's what I mean by sane :) Switching spaces/profiles mid-job is always going to be messy (read lossy). I was mainly pointing to the per-doc setting: either RGB or CMYK. That part seems sane - automatic conversion is a little less sane, I agree ;)
With that being said, I don't particularly care for having the RGB sliders in CMYK mode but occasionally I sample something like a web page (with say, gColor2) and the colors are given in RGB/hex - being able to create a new color with RGB values and then have it instantly converted to CMYK on the fly is moderately useful - but then I don't do that very often.
To further complicate things, Adobe recommends keeping parts in RGB as long as possible, and only converting to CMYK as you actually place/print things through their publishing app, InDesign. (Unless you are working directly in the CMYK for the specific print job, it's better to keep the source piece of art in RGB so it can be converted for flyers, t-shirts, etc. with top fidelity).
Heh - not the first time I've disagreed with Adobe (seen the UI on CS3 and above?). I stay in CMYK colorspace 90% of the time. Even doing a web page layout (no really - it makes sense: if I use CMYK colors on the site, then their business cards, flyers, etc. can match the site). I get far less of "OMG my colors are totally wrong!!!" and "Why can't it be BLUE like my email sig?!" than the other way around. Plus, I can avoid those colors like #0000FF - which are not only painful to view, but will never, ever print properly in CMYK.
But then again, I don't like surprises much :)
Chris