: Converting PDF from RGB to CMYK with freeware or OSS I print marketing regularly at my job, and everything is sent to us as PDFs. The problem is, the color profile is always set to RGB,

@BetL875

I just realised that I can save my PDF as and EPS in Acrobat... that seemed to have helped.

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@Murray976

The already mentioned ghostscript is the free standard tool for this problem. If the use of the command line looks too daunting, you could use a free web service like: www.pdf2cmyk.com. You won't have any control whats really happening with your images, but the results are good as far as I tested. You can choose different output profiles (SWOP and ISO).

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@Kimberly620

Use ghostscript, its the most obvious OSS tool for the job. Here's a sample for windows usage from stackoverflow [1]:

gswin32.exe ^
-o -o c:/path/to/output-cmyk.pdf ^
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
-dUseCIEColor ^
-sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK ^
-sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK ^
-sColorConversionStrategyForImages=CMYK ^
input-rgb.pdf


Tested and worked fine for 3 of my test PDF's. There are other ways to do color conversion to be more specifically what you want but this is probably enough for you, as for software selection.

Ghostscript is a quite complex application capable of very many things provided that you do the proper research. So it can do other things like add watermarks, translate pages etc. You probably need -sOutputICCProle = my device prole.icc[2].

References:


Script (or some other means) to convert RGB to CMYK in PDF?, 2012. Stackoverflow.
Ghostscript 9.07 Color Management

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