504 - Type in Context - Colour Profile Considerations

To help us become more independent with our print process, and have a more in-depth understanding of how it all works, we had a colour profile induction with James in the digital print room. We learnt about what it actually is with relevance to RGB and CMYK in order to print correctly and see the same colours printed that we do when designing on-screen.

A colour profile is a numerical model of a colour space. Operating systems and programs need to have access to a profile that describes the meaning of the colour values in order to interpret the colour correctly. Proper colour management requires all image files to have an embedded profile.

This means our entire workspace on InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator has to be set in a colour profile that will be compatible with the printer we will be printing with to see the same results. It is possible to convert this afterwards if needs be, but this will result in some change of colours in images, etc which will need to be edited. 

This has made me realise how I will have to convert all of my Type in Context images for the publication from RGB to CMYK for print in order for them to be compatible with James' most common colour profile for the double sided Digital Print printers downstairs.. from "sRGB IEC61966- 2.1" into "U.S. Web Version (SWOP) v2"