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.
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).
:-)