On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 1:29 PM, John Culleton <john@...1202...> wrote:
- Use CMYK from the beginning to develop a print document. This gets
around the smaller gamut problem.
That is achievable through softproofing, which already works in Inkscape. But again, it works best when you can use the specific profile of the target printer.
- For exact colors don't depend on a monitor representation,
calibrated or no. Take the CMYK values and look them up on e.g. Galaxy Color Gauge Color Pro. This still won't be "exact exact" but it will be the closest you can get without having the printer produce a proof copy.
As my father used say, don't fight the problem. Printing presses use process colors AKA CMYK. Work backwards from that.
My impression is that the really smart printing presses do make their print profiles available, so that users can softproof their work and correct gamut problems, but then still accept art it RGB and do separation themselves, if only because there are many many gotchas in this process, often idiosyncratic to the specific printer, which the user is unlikely to get right without the right experience.
Of course I'm not arguing against adding CMYK to PDF export, there are lots of legitimate uses for that. I just don't think it's as "absolute" prerequisite for professional printing as many make it out to be.