Okay, it's karma. One of my older sisters has become a photographer (and winning quite a few contests, having shows, that sort of thing), but I'm still helping her make the digital transition. She just called and asked me almost the same question, so I had to go to the Big Guns. I asked a superb graphic artist friend of mine for his input, and his son had the best answer (of course, his son being smarter than my friend and I put together). I will quote him (changing the pronouns, as this was going for my sister):
"The idea you're thinking of in terms of a "handshake" is an ICC color profile, which is basically a summary of your color settings that tells Photoshop how to handle color. If he's using Photoshop, then all he has to do is tell it to "embed" the color profile within the graphic file: All he needs to do is make sure that when he saves a photo he uses File > Save As, that he remembers to a) save it as a Photoshop file, not a JPEG, TIFF, or PNG, to make sure this works and b) in the Save As... dialog box, make sure that the checkbox "Embed Color Profile" (on the Mac, or "ICC Profile" on the PC) is checked. Then, tell the print shop to use the embedded color profile, and he should be all set."
I think couple this with a Spyder2Pro to get true colors on your monitor, and it might do the trick. You could always have the print shop send you a sample to double-check.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
wow again great information thanks! After playing with photoshop for the entire day i have realized a few things. When I open the project the image looks perfect in CMYK obviously. If I convert the image to RGB under modes and export to JPG, TIFF or what ever else, it looks identical in preview. The problem lies when I export under CMYK. It doesn't matter what format I make it, it looks washed out, even if I embed the profile. The last part about sending them the .psd file with the embedded color profile I didn't even think of. I guess that would ensure when they open it on there end, they will see what I do. I am tempted to do this all the time to make sure everything goes right.
** After opening the .psd on my friends computer it comes out darker, but he didnt really setup his monitors right...so i need to see on someone elses computer before i send out this project.
There's no absolute guarantee that it will be the same because there has to be a color space conversion somewhere in there. In your case from your image profile to the printing device's color range. My brother once showed me supposedly color accurate printing and it's close but there are variations. You'd really expect that to some degree due to the way different media react to light. Plus you have color changes due to absorption and things when dealing with ink.
It shouldn't be extreme though and if you embed the profile as mentioned above, that should do the trick - you may have to assign one first. This won't necessarily work for displaying on another computer because it may ignore the embedded profiles. I think this is one reason why Macs are preferred over PCs in prepress and DTP - they seem to be better at system-wide color management than Windows.
Basically if you embed the profile from Photoshop where it looks good then it is letting the program displaying it know what color space the image looks good/correct in and it will adapt the colors to look the same in the color space it is using. If it ignores the embedded profile, the program will assume the image was created in the same color space it's using already and so it won't look right.
You also get an option in Photoshop to convert to profile. This can be useful if you want to target a color space where people may not be using a color managed workflow. For example, if you want to put stuff online where sRGB is standard but you're working from Adobe 1998. Most people won't have a color managed setup (not sure if IE is managed). The conversion will pretranslate to the target color space so even in an unmanaged system, it will look how you intend assuming the target profile is most common on the receiving end.
You generally don't want to do color space conversions as you can get clipping of your colors. For example if you have two bright red values in your color space that get translated to another color space and the translation result is that there is one red that most closely matches both then you lose the variation that was in the original.
Here are a couple of sites that explain more stuff:
You should have some discussion with your printer though and maybe get some tests done because they can advise you what will come out looking best on your target printer and print material. Where I work, we get told not to use so much black in designs as they have problems printing some stuff. You may also need to include bleed information:
Comments
Okay, it's karma. One of my older sisters has become a photographer (and winning quite a few contests, having shows, that sort of thing), but I'm still helping her make the digital transition. She just called and asked me almost the same question, so I had to go to the Big Guns. I asked a superb graphic artist friend of mine for his input, and his son had the best answer (of course, his son being smarter than my friend and I put together). I will quote him (changing the pronouns, as this was going for my sister):
"The idea you're thinking of in terms of a "handshake" is an ICC color profile, which is basically a summary of your color settings that tells Photoshop how to handle color. If he's using Photoshop, then all he has to do is tell it to "embed" the color profile within the graphic file: All he needs to do is make sure that when he saves a photo he uses File > Save As, that he remembers to a) save it as a Photoshop file, not a JPEG, TIFF, or PNG, to make sure this works and b) in the Save As... dialog box, make sure that the checkbox "Embed Color Profile" (on the Mac, or "ICC Profile" on the PC) is checked. Then, tell the print shop to use the embedded color profile, and he should be all set."
I think couple this with a Spyder2Pro to get true colors on your monitor, and it might do the trick. You could always have the print shop send you a sample to double-check.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
wow again great information thanks! After playing with photoshop for the entire day i have realized a few things. When I open the project the image looks perfect in CMYK obviously. If I convert the image to RGB under modes and export to JPG, TIFF or what ever else, it looks identical in preview. The problem lies when I export under CMYK. It doesn't matter what format I make it, it looks washed out, even if I embed the profile. The last part about sending them the .psd file with the embedded color profile I didn't even think of. I guess that would ensure when they open it on there end, they will see what I do. I am tempted to do this all the time to make sure everything goes right.
** After opening the .psd on my friends computer it comes out darker, but he didnt really setup his monitors right...so i need to see on someone elses computer before i send out this project.
There's no absolute guarantee that it will be the same because there has to be a color space conversion somewhere in there. In your case from your image profile to the printing device's color range. My brother once showed me supposedly color accurate printing and it's close but there are variations. You'd really expect that to some degree due to the way different media react to light. Plus you have color changes due to absorption and things when dealing with ink.
It shouldn't be extreme though and if you embed the profile as mentioned above, that should do the trick - you may have to assign one first. This won't necessarily work for displaying on another computer because it may ignore the embedded profiles. I think this is one reason why Macs are preferred over PCs in prepress and DTP - they seem to be better at system-wide color management than Windows.
Basically if you embed the profile from Photoshop where it looks good then it is letting the program displaying it know what color space the image looks good/correct in and it will adapt the colors to look the same in the color space it is using. If it ignores the embedded profile, the program will assume the image was created in the same color space it's using already and so it won't look right.
You also get an option in Photoshop to convert to profile. This can be useful if you want to target a color space where people may not be using a color managed workflow. For example, if you want to put stuff online where sRGB is standard but you're working from Adobe 1998. Most people won't have a color managed setup (not sure if IE is managed). The conversion will pretranslate to the target color space so even in an unmanaged system, it will look how you intend assuming the target profile is most common on the receiving end.
You generally don't want to do color space conversions as you can get clipping of your colors. For example if you have two bright red values in your color space that get translated to another color space and the translation result is that there is one red that most closely matches both then you lose the variation that was in the original.
Here are a couple of sites that explain more stuff:
http://www.gballard.net/psd/assignconvert.html
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/profiles.htm
You should have some discussion with your printer though and maybe get some tests done because they can advise you what will come out looking best on your target printer and print material. Where I work, we get told not to use so much black in designs as they have problems printing some stuff. You may also need to include bleed information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_(printing)
thanks, I'll read those links now