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When my printshop lets their printer print an image with an embedded sRGB profile, and no CMYK based profile, with the printer managing the colour mapping itself it always does a good job. If instead they print using their chosen FOGRA27 CMYK profile, it's normally okay, but for some images it gets the blue/greens wrong.

But they will not do batch jobs as printer managed jobs because they insist the printer will not consistently output the same throughout the batch, whereas it will if they use the FOGRA27Coated profile.

But why would this be so?

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  • Something about this problem seems missing, unclear, or misconfigured. Their RIP should use a profile for automatic conversion and if their FOGRA27Coated profile is preferred, I don't see why they wouldn't use that as the default.
    – Dan Wolfgang
    Nov 17, 2015 at 19:48
  • Its quite possible Ive misunderstood something but they have given me two sets, one that looks great (that they have marked sRGB) and one that does not that they have marked CMYK and they will only go with the CMYK one.
    – Paul Taylor
    Nov 17, 2015 at 20:48
  • Wait -- in the question you talk about color consistency, but in your comment you talk of a color mismatch or shift. Those are very different things. If you soft proof to the CMYK profile you should be able to see the color shift, and you should also be correcting for it. While on this topic: from all of your other questions I'm unclear why you are printing to a CMYK device -- presumably it's a PostScript device? Your print vendor should have an RGB profile you can use, which is likely a simpler and more familiar process.
    – Dan Wolfgang
    Nov 18, 2015 at 0:15
  • Upgraded to Ligthroom 6 Ive worked out that neither sRGB
    – Paul Taylor
    Nov 18, 2015 at 12:00
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    The FOGRA27 profile is for comercial offset print. A "printshop" could be for printing photos on an inkjet based printer. That needs its own profile, which they usually autoconvert based on the sRGB.
    – Rafael
    Nov 18, 2015 at 13:24

1 Answer 1

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The CMYK profile may be getting the colors right. When you input a RAW image into Lightroom or ACR the colors are very wide gamut. When you look at them on your monitor the colors are rendered to the monitor color space. My monitor is sRGB. If you render the print file in sRGB it will appear as close as possible to the image on your monitor. If you render to CMYK there may be some colors that the monitor could not display but the printer could print. The prints will look different that what the monitor displays. The print is correct, not the monitor display.

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  • I suppose you could be right however where it is different the sRGB one is the one that looks correct/realistic and the CMYK one is the one that looks wrong so its seems to be more likely that there are colours in the sRGB image that could not be correctly converted to the CMYK profile.
    – Paul Taylor
    Nov 17, 2015 at 20:53
  • .. but they could be converted to a suitable printer colour when the printer itself decided on how to map the rgb colour to the right printing ink combination
    – Paul Taylor
    Nov 17, 2015 at 21:11
  • Looked into SoftProofing on Lightroom 6 and discovered a few things. For my problem images even though Im happy with how they look on screen softproofing to sRGB shows large areas that could not be mapped accurately, this occurs even though some images are not raw but jpgs with embedded sRGB profile. Worked out this is due to the modifications Ive made in lightroom if I create a virtual copy, reset develop then softproof to rgb there are no problem pixels.
    – Paul Taylor
    Nov 18, 2015 at 11:56
  • Interestingly the monitor must have wider gamout then sRGB because I never got any blue on the image even though 'Show Gamout Warning' was enabled. But CMYK is no better than sRGB its shows very similar areas that could not be mapped, and if I go to original image with no chnages it cant fully map that either. All images can be mapped by PhotoPro profile so Im thinking will see if I can give printer pdf with PhotoPro profile so at least will only be mapping areas once not twice.
    – Paul Taylor
    Nov 18, 2015 at 11:59
  • With "Show Gamut Warning" you are seeing the areas of the image that can't be printed correctly. You need to fix that by bringing those colors within the range of what the printer can handle.
    – Dan Wolfgang
    Nov 18, 2015 at 14:03

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