Can't find colour profile settings?

[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.