As for Fogra, once I started using this colour profile I started to get much richer colours in my prints, it made a huge difference.

I have working spaces set to sRGB and Coated Fogra 39.

I have Policies set to Convert for both.

Is there anything I should be doing different? Or should take this one to the forum?

@David: Oh not in trouble, certainly not, ha ha. I love a good conversation! (Heck, on SMag I just reply’ed to about 150 comments, lol) Thank you for your detailed comments! I agree with you on (almost) everything. It’s important people understand this is a highly detailed conversation and differences pop up because f the way we choose to use the Creative Suite. In the end we all want the same thing, nice artwork!

“Using sRGB for InDesign’s default RGB working space just makes sense.” Technically this is correct of course and it is way better than converting everything to cmyk up front, but you are a veteran designer and know exactly what you’re doing. I work in a large studio with files going back and forth, in and out, and feel sRGB really has nog place in a print-environment. I try to keep it simple for everybody and stick to aRGB for new P’shop files and for InDesign. Some parts of the cmyk-range and a lot of the Pantone colors are out of range for sRGB as well. I try not to use it unless for web. If I ever need to send out RGB files in the near future (whenever the Certified PDF people pick it up) using non-icc-tagged images from the web will be a problem I suppose.

I’m not really in to the US CMYK profiles like swop and such, but anything FOGRA related is cool. Adobe uses a altered set for Europe with a so called ’short black’. It was based up on the older FOGRA 27 dataset, and Isocoated_V2 on FOGRA 39. But I think Adobe has incorporated this as well know.

Yes for some specialized pictures it might be a good idea to manually remove little dots. However people sometimes forget to select the right kind of cmyk-profile in P’shop or afterwards select another cmyk-profile when exporting to pdf in InDesign. The possible advantage of eliminating small dots in the black plate would get lost when the inkt-buildup (and such) is set for the different kind of paper. A lot of designers also start to change the curves and white/black ratio, contrast etc. after converting to cmyk in P’shop. This is generally a bad idea as the profile has already optimized the colors for the paper and process…

The article skipped smarter PDF files on purpose. It could be a separate article all together. I would love to export with layers, icc-tags, rgb images, transparency and such but for now it is not commonly accepted… When printers understand more about icc I’m sure they’ll love to receive smarter PDF files!

Thanks again for taking the time to comment on your thoughts! I enjoy talking to the experts. (You’re the expert David, I’m just a guy that bumped his head a lot of times during the pre-press process. I just happen to remember exactly when,where and how I bumped it!)

* I do not think it’s a good idea to have all CS apps have the same color settings. See this post for more on why I think ID should use General Purpose and PS should use General Prepress.

* The discussion of using custom target profiles is really important, but way more complex (unfortunately) than you could cover in the size of that article without scaring people away. But the basic idea of getting a profile and then specifying that profile when exporting the PDF (using Convert to Destination Preserve Numbers) is a great direction to point people.

* There are times when converting to CMYK in Photoshop is better. For example, if you need to do touchups on the black plate (e.g., to remove black dots from a model’s face) or because you need to print the same image 100 times from InDesign (better to have PS do the conversion once than ID doing it 100 times).

* Most people are printing to offset sheetfed presses. I’m hearing reports that using the GRaCOL profile in CS4 provides significantly better results in these situations than SWOP, for example (which wasn’t ever really intended for sheetfed).

* You also sort of ignore the PDF/X3 or PDF/X4 workflow, where you’re actually sending the RGB images in the PDF, and letting the printer do the conversion. That is a much better solution, as long as the printer is on board (most north american printers are not, but it’s a joy to find those who are).

I haven’t even read all the comments on that post, but it looks like there’s quite a discussion!

I applaud your tackling these issues, though. Thanks.

* Originally [and still, to a degree] I view the show as something that’s talking about tips and tricks and off-the-wall ways to do things. There are already great resources for teaching “best practices” and “from the ground up” training, and I don’t think duplicating those things does much good for the community.

* I have a potty mouth, and while I haven’t cursed on the show before, I don’t rule it out! I won’t publish the profanity- and Red Bull-fueled rant about Activation that I recently recorded … but I was tempted!

* I didn’t want to put InDesign in the title, as I didn’t want to be locked into just talking about InDesign.

Instead of EPS I use either PSD or PDF, depending on the content.

PSD will always output as raster. So if you’re going to have type, vector masks, vector shapes etc. then a PDF would be better.

PDFs can be editable in photoshop and can also contain layers, and most importantly the photoshop pdf will output vectors and raster.

Just my two cents.