Can't find colour profile settings?

[Hey Ottist]

Most print shops want CMYK I believe. Fortunately I'm working in monochrome b/w at the moment. But for future I will need to work in colour. Problem is, I can't find colour settings in the programme. I'd like to be able to set it at CMYK for the purposes of professional printing, how do I do that?

[markw]

Unfortunately colour spaces/profiles can not be assigned to paintings in ArtRage or during export.
So if you need a specific colour space for an image you will need to assign the exported image file your desired colour profile in another app.
On Macs you can do this using the built-in OS app Preview. I don’t know if Windows has an equivalent built-in app.
And of course there is a vast amount of third party image editing apps out there, from free to expensive, that can also do this.

Effectively the output from ArtRage is RGB and so assigning an icc profile like the standard: sRGB IEC61966-2.1 should not affect the visual appearance of the image on your screen.

Regarding “Most print shops” don’t assume anything!
Always ask what file format they need or prefer and the specific colour profile it should have.
The two print shops I use prefer TIFF’s and only in sRGB IEC61966-2.1. I have yet to be disappointed by any of their work.

[Hey Ottist]

thanks for your reply Mark. I'm new to digital art and currently collaborating on an illustrated short story. We are self publishing and have found a few good printers. I have a few graphic designer friends who say cmyk is important however converting from RGB to CMYK in a program (like Photoshop for e.g.) can make colours go muddy. However, having just found and read the thread on colour profiles I see that calibration stuff is required so your colours relate to screen and surroundings, ambient light etc. All stuff I need to learn. The printers I have spoken to have said they request cmyk in their files. It's not like getting your paints out is it? Thank goodness I'm working in B&W. I think once i've learnt a bit more I'll graduate to a professional digital art program. This is a good starting point though.

[Somerset]

CMYK is important for printing, because it is the colour space for body colours (material colours). RGB is a colour space for the colours of light. Basically colour is a phenomena of light - without light, colours wouldn't exist. The Mixing of light colours works additional. Starting with darkness = black, you mix any colour you want by adding the primary colours of light: Red, Green and Blue (RGB). All this three colour channels set to 255 will mix pure white (remember Isaac Newton!). In opposite to this, the colour mixing for body colours starts with the white of the paper you will print on. By printing colour on the paper, the colour will absorb parts of the light that illuminates the paper. Some parts of the spectral colours will be reflected, others will not. So in the average, the body colour mixing works subtractive, cause there will be light subtracted. The primary colours of the subtractive colour mixing are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow - the complementary colours of RGB on the colour wheel (Cyan is the complementary colour of Red, Magenta of Green and Yellow of Blue). Because you can't mix pure black with CMY-colours, printers use an additional so called "key colour" - Black. The RGB color space is much bigger and not fully congruent to the CMYK colour space, so that the colours will change whenever you convert from RGB to CMYK. In the best cases you can't see a difference. But often you have to correct the colours a little after the conversion, to get better results. In that case you will need to use a software like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or Affinity Photo for the conversion and correction of the colours. GIMP can't convert to CMYK, but you could use Krita alternatively, wich also is Open Source and free.

Another important point is to use the right CMYK-profile for the paper you will print on. For that you should consult your trusted printer.

Edit: For B&W you just need a greyscale profile. In that case you will not need to convert to CMYK. Anyway you should also ask your printers what certain profile you should use for the printing.

[markw]

I'm new to digital art and currently collaborating on an illustrated short story. We are self publishing and have found a few good printers.

Nothing like starting in at the deep end! I wish you all good fortune with your book
And yes it’s not like getting your paints out! Less mess for one thing!
Although ArtRage has no built-in colour management I would like to say that it can still be used and is used for professional work by many artists as can be seen here: https://www.artrage.com/featured-artists/

Once you are familiar the differences between screen colours, emitted light, and printed colours, reflected light, you do get a feel for what colour palettes aren’t going to translate well into print when working on a screen. But soft proofing is still a vital part of a workflow, as indeed are test prints.
Many print houses doing fin art prints like the two I use are using 12 colour head printers which can offer a greater range of colours, and whilst still not perhaps covering the full RGB range can get closer to it than 4 colour CMYK. So in many ways it can pay to know in advance who is going to print your work before hand and what their requirements will be. It could be that you are safe to work in RGB through out some projects.

[Hey Ottist]

All very interesting folks, very informative. I have been reading up on various blogs about colour profiles, digital art software etc. All very interesting. I actually found a blog that said RGB is superior to CYMK and that printers requiring CYMK often have older equipment or just stuck in "that's how it's done" new technologies change and improve. I can remember years ago (in the 80s) when I was illustrating for a writer, everything needed to be b&W and NO GREY! because of the cost and limits to printing back then.

Another thing I have come across is the digiart software reviews by artists and blogs, ArtRage and Rebelle are always given very good reviews. I do like the sound of Rebelle for the watercolour rendering it sounds very good. I favour watercolour and though it's very nice in art rage i find aspects a little frustrating, that may well be in part due to my lack of experience using this software, but I can't get the bleeds, sploshes and runs I love about watercolour. I wonder if any programmes match (or will match) the joy of granulation. I like to use masking fluid for effect as well, that would be a nice option to have rather than , or as well as the stencils (which are lots of fun).

Enjoying this learning curve though

[markw]

Ah, the watercolour tool possibly my favourite AR tool.
True, it doesn’t behave exactly as real world watercolours do but there are always tradeoff’s in any software over lifelike and speed & functionality.
Rebelle’s watercolour dose come closer to lifelike to use than AR’s but I found it requires quite a powerful CPU to bring it up to the speed I wanted to work at. (But this was quite a long time ago and I should probably give v3 a try at some point. But as AR is CPU processing based that is the hardware area where I have tended to invest in so my computer specs may be better suited to giving Rebelle a fair run now).

Any way all that aside what I was going to say was that if you haven’t already found them, AR users Steve B and Someonesane have some good AR tutorials which are worth a look for techniques for recreating a traditional watercolour look.
Steve B videos: https://www.artrage.com/how-to-paint...stephen-berry/
Someonesane: https://www.artrage.com/into-the-sta...y-someonesane/

[Hey Ottist]

Yeah, not sure if my old Mac would be up to Rebelle, would need to check specs.

I will have a look at those links, thank you

[Nickimathew]

In the event that you need a particular shading space for a picture you should allot the sent out picture record your ideal shading profile in another application. On Macs you can do this utilizing the implicit OS application Preview. I don't have a clue whether Windows has an identical worked in application. What's more, obviously there is a tremendous measure of outsider picture altering applications out there, from allowed to costly, that can likewise do this.