: Relationship between onscreen/printed CMYK and RGB I edited a picture book using scribus, color management enabled, with CMYK TIFF images and corresponding profile as input. In principle my screen

@Samaraweera207

Posted in: #Color #ColorConversion #ColorProfile #PrintDesign #PrintProduction

I edited a picture book using scribus, color management enabled, with CMYK TIFF images and corresponding profile as input. In principle my screen has been calibrated, though more than one year ago.

I set the output :


to PDFX-1a, for "printing", with a CMYK print profile ;
to PDF-1.5, for "web", with a "compatible with Adobe RGB (1998)" profile.


Then I sent the first version to a professional printer.

I always assumed the following relationship between versions, expecting onscreen CMYK to be off :

printed CMYK ≃ onscreen RGB ≠ onscreen CMYK


And indeed when color management is enabled in scribus the rendering of CMYK pictures is that of RGB.

However I just received the printer's proofs, and the actual relationship is as follows :

printed CMYK = onscreen CMYK ≠ onscreen RGB


Did I miss something, or is my workflow presumably wrong ?

Update :

My understanding of the CMYK workflow was indubitably wrong, but I was strongly mislead by the "compatible with Adobe RGB (1998)" profile(which is scribus' default). I figured using the sRGB profile for screen rendering gives colors much more similar to the CMYK rendering. It seems a known fact : quoting WP entry on Adobe RGB color space, "all of the adjustments made CMYK conversion worse than before"…

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