designing disc cover with an rgb pic

[chris f]

I'm about to send off the dvd of my short film to be professionally printed and duplicated, but I am confused and nervous about the whole RGB/CMYK thing. The files I am sending to the duplicator have to be in CMYK, which I understand, so I designed everything in Photoshop CS in CMYK. The problem is that I am using a photo that my photographer friend shot on his Digital SLR camera and the raw photo file is RGB. I copied and pasted the picture from the RGB raw file into a layer in my CMYK design and the appearance of the picture didn't change, but when I print it off, it looks horribly different than on screen.

However, I had movie posters of the same image printed off at Staples on their wide format 7 color inkjet printer and they turned out fantastic. This poster file was in RGB mode though.

So I guess what I'm asking is there a certain process that will convert the RGB photo to CMYK exactly so what I see on screen will be what is printed?

 

[ullanta]

If you brought the picture into a CMYK photoshop document, it should have done the conversion then, and the colors should be consistent with the rest of your image... that is, it shouldn't be that whewn printed ONLY the photo changed in color; the whole design probably changed significantly. This does not address the relation between what you see on screen and what is printed... that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

You've done basically the right thing - work in CMYK for anything that will be professionally printed, otherwise, when the printer translates to CMYK, consistency between different elements of your design goes out the window. In CMYK your picture will remain internally consistent, but the trick is matching your screen to the printed output. There are many profiling tools and techniques for this, but it's always tricky. How often do you do this, and how much do you want to spend? If the answer is "not often" and "not much", then your best bet, if they're willing, is to print out a version of your image at home that you like, and ask the printer to try and tweak your output to match it.

 

[chris f]

"not often" and "not much" is exactly right. I think my printer might be running low on a cartridge cause I noticed after I posted the thread that it's printing everything weird tonight. I'll stop by a local printer tomorrow and print off one of my rgb posters and one of the cmyk disc covers and see how they match up. Thanks.