[Fwd: Grappling with colour]

[Hedley Finger <hedley.finger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been able to successfully ignore colour issues for over 10 years
until now because all printed deliverables have been laser printer
output.

Now I am having to tackle CMYK issues at last.  Object: illustrations
consisting of *.bmp screen dumps and a few JPG photographs, originated
in FrameMaker, 'printed' to PostScript, Distilled with options optimized
for print, resulting in colour Acrobat PDF files for producing
colour-separated film.

Experiments have revealed some problems.  Specifically, for *.bmp screen
dumps in colour, changing them to CMYK in Photoshop and saving to TIFF
dithers the colours and introduces artefacts, such as text break-up and
anti-aliasing of straight pixel-boundary edges (why? no curves to
smooth!).

Saving CMYK conversions in EPS (EPSF, EPSI) also produces moiré and
break-up if the graphics are resized because of a poor interpolation
algorithm** in ... what? PostScript? Acrobat Distiller?. 

Any war stories or good advice?  Does anybody know of RGB-->CMYK
conversion utilities that do best approximations of colour, pixel to
pixel, and do not dither (Mac or Win).  A colleague has experienced
problems with CMYK TIFFs not separating at the bureau which has their
people baffled.  I haven't got that far yet so any advice for her is
also appreciated.

[Dov & Lee: I promise I will read every single one of your posts in
future. (Grovel, grovel.)]

[FrameMaker 5.5.6, Acrobat 3.02, AdobePS 4.2.6, Distiller 3.02 PPD,
Windows 98, HP OmniBook 2100]

** Unlike the resizing algorithms native to FrameMaker and Word, which
do a remarkably good job of interpolation.


Regards,
Hedley Finger   Technical Writer


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Ericsson Australia Pty Ltd
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