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working in CMYK with photoshop ...doubts

Dear Friends , thatÃ'´s my 1st post on this forum ,

I have to do some print work and have had some doubts :
I am not totally used to adobe photoshop and thus made up my mind to design an advertisment lay out on Fireworks CS3 which I command best though only supports RGB ;
Moreover there was already a logo created with Fireworks ;

I basically designed vectorial paths with pen tool and pasted as mask highresolution pictures to adjust to the round paths shapes.
The backgroud of the layout has been created with some paths with a high amount of feather and gradients.

All the work has been done in RGB @ 300 DPIS and then I exported the layout as a .jpg highresolution file which it was dragged onto a photoshop configured in CMYK canvas.
The text has been applied onto this image and I respected CMYK colours ; file has been saved in PSD , and thatÃ'´s what I intend to send to the magazine to be printed.
I have worked this way before with reasonable results , though the previous arts did not contain gradients.

What else I can do to improve the printing result ? what advices you can give me to avoid printing problems ?

PS: I will not conceal my dislike of photoshop work flow , which I consider a bit clumsy , and makes it difficult the things I can do with Firework easily , as punch vectorial shapes or design a logo. Otherwise I would have designed all the stuff on photoshop ;

Last edited by RonWolpa, August 8th, 2007 07:47 AM (Edited 1 times)

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Actually you did anything you could do in PS. 300 dpi is the perfect resolution for digital printing as you know, more wouldn´t make the image sharper.

Do not brighten up the image in CMYK mode, that changes the K and maybe cause brightness modifications you didn´t want. Brighten it in RGB first and then change to CMYK-mode.

UCR is the best choice for offset printing, maximimum black on 100%.
entire color application should be 360% as long as you´re not printing on super thin paper.

If you want specific colors, you should add a color scheme, which should be still applied during the print itself.

when i´m preparing a file for printing, i add crop marks and change to CMYK mode at the very end to make sure all black is as black as wanted. then i save it as a .pdf with the
following settings:

- ICC Profile: U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
- Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4)
- Do not downsample
- No color conversion
- include destination profile

With this you should be shure the printer is about to print what you´ve really created.

Besides: asking the magazine for their preferred file-type is never a mistake, it shows
circumspection which makes you a nice guy.

Stay in the flow..

greets.

___________________

Last edited by famuz, September 9th, 2007 11:47 AM (Edited 2 times)