Converting a sRGB PDF to a bunch of CMYK TIFFS

This year, we're getting clubcard to print our annual calendars. However, living in the world of reflected light they accept artwork in CMYK colour space, and not RGB .

This opened up the can of worms that we had mostly been ignorant of before -- colour management. There are lots of resources on the web for how to set up a workflow for colour management.

However, I needed to stitch a pages from different sRGB sources, and convert them to CMYK.

The best way I found to do this was:

* rasterize the images to TIFF in RGB space. I used ghostscript
* get sRGB and CMYK colour profiles from Adobe
* use LCMS (Little Color Management System) to project the images from RGB to CMYK
* compress the resultant tiffs and hand them off

Although ghostscript can rasterize directly to CMYK TIFFs, I was unable to find how to apply a colour profile to the process, and the results were poor.

In the future, I'll just use Scrubus to generate the whole thing directly in CMYK.


jack | posted Wed Dec 6 13:55:12 2006 | #
category: debris

A weblog by Jack Cummings