JoeM845

dmeyer,


I found the image file you uploaded. It has some nice rich colors, so I tried an experiment to see if you be dealing with a range of colors too rich to print with Vistaprint's setup.

There are many CMYK profiles. They are usually very tied to particular combinations of printer/presses and papers and inks. I know nothing about Vistaprint. I chose "Working CMK - U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2" out of the many CMYK choices in my PS (no reason).

I downloaded, saved, and opened it the file PS. PS treated it as sRGB. I selected a proof color of "Working CMYK" and displayed it in proof color with gamut warning. The display soft proof is shown in the picture. The gray areas are the gamut warnings. The gray color is an indicator of where the problems are; it does not mean that you will actually see gray. It means that the color you would see in Working CMYK will differ from the color you would see in sRGB. That color cannot be accurately expressed in Working CMYK. There are a lot of colors that can be expressed in sRGB, but are beyond the range of Working CMYK. Typically (maybe always) it will be less saturated. If your print looked bad in just the areas that show the gamut warning it may mean that your print has colors too rich for their printers/papers (or whatever CMYK profile they handle).

You can do soft proofing in LR (hit S in Develop module), but apparently you cannot select any CMYK profile in versions 2015.5/6.6 or later. I have never used it. I expect it is only used when you have an image in one of the richer RGBs and have to export in sRGB.

This may help explain things. If not my quiver is empty. Good luck.

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

I used Adoramapix years ago and liked their printing results, then they disappeared. Did not know about Printique. Is it the essentially same software as Adoramapix? Seems I remember they took TIFF images for printing.

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

You bring up a very important point, Dennis, that I learned late in the game...monitor being too bright. I think mine resides around 25-30 now instead of 55-60. That made a world of difference in the editing results. The link you shared looks very straight forward. Do you use it yourself and is it safe?

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

Thanks for sharing the tips, Joe. LR6 exports in sRGB, Adobe RGB, PhotoPro RGB, and Display P3. I keep my export setting on sRGB. I want to stay with Vistaprint because they have a cleaner program for calendars, especially for someone like myself that likes the KISS method. Just give me a black or dark charcoal background and a narrow white frame around the image and I'm good. What makes getting the desired results difficult is never getting the same Cust. Serv. rep twice. Some know a lot and, I suspect, some read scripts from a handbook.

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

Wow, as they say, "A picture is worth a thousand words"! That really brings the issue into focus for me. Thank you so much, Joe. The contrast was missing in the waterfalls calendar and now I can visibly see the why in the explanations. Unfortunately, I may need to find a new calendar source, since converting to a color space that I haven't edited for sounds counter-productive.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Yes, they renamed to Printique, either because they sold off the operation or merged the printing with someone else. I got a bunch of emails about the change, now fourish year ago, so my memory has become vague.

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

I will check that out.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I just checked my installed Photoshop CS6 (ver. 13.01) out of curiosity.... I have more than 20 different CMYK profiles installed! There also is provision to create a custom profile.

Which one does Vistaprint want you to use?

I hope you don't mind... I wanted to see if there were any problems converting your image to CMYK... I'm "sending the conversions back to you" here so you can view on your own computer and see if there's any difference.

First image below is a straight sRGB > CMYK conversion with no other work done to it.

Second image below, when I compared the first conversion side-by-side with your sRGB version, I thought the CMYK copy was slightly desaturated. So I tried again slightly increasing saturation before doing the sRGB > CMYK conversion. That's the only change done, though.

Both conversions were done in Photoshop and using a calibrated IPS monitor (a bit old, now, but still working pretty well).

P.S. IMPORTANT NOTE: I discovered that the CMYK conversions were way too big to upload here at UHH. There's a limit of 20MB image size here. Each CMYK conversion roughly doubled the size of your file, which was already right at the limit. I've had to go back and reduce the size of those conversions, in order to upload them here.

ANOTHER NOTE: This is a big fail for some unknown reason! After I changed the size and was able to upload, the apparent saturation of both CMYK conversion greatly increased HERE ON UHH. I don't know why this is occurring, because both conversions in Photoshop appear very close to your original. Sorry, but I have no idea how to prevent this apparent over-saturation. Maybe it's unique to how the CMYK looks in my internet browser space. For that reason I'm leaving these up so you can try saving the images to your computer to see if they look more "normal".

Straight sRGB to CMYK conversion

(Download)

sRGB to CMYK conversion with slight increase in saturation

(Download)

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

Well, I talked with Printique's Jack and he got me started with the guidelines for making a calendar. Since they print using sRGB, my images were ready. Overall, I really like their calendar program and will know in a few weeks how the final output looks. Thanks for putting me on to them, Paul!

dmeyer Loc: Marion, NC

I sure appreciate your giving it a try, Alan! If you think the oversaturation is weird, try opening the download!!! It looks like someone drained all the energy out of the scene--totally washed out. Can't imagine why there'd be such a discrepancy between the download and the preview. I don't think, at this point, conversion to CMYK looks as appealing anymore, lol.
As it turns out, I followed up on Paul's suggestion of Printique and am going to give them a try on the calendars. They use sRGB for their print work, so my pictures are ready to go. The program was very intuitive as well.

joecichjr Loc: Chicago S. Suburbs, Illinois, USA

Beautiful 💛🧡💚❤️💙