So now we've got our basic workflow for our Adobe apps established. You may want to pass along your .csf file to your customers along with the profiles so they can play too. So now we need to load this color workflow into Adobe Acrobat. Go into"preferences", color management and choose the settings you just saved in Photoshop. So now that everything is sync 'ed, let's get Pitstop managed.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro

Pitstop Pro

So, get on in to Pitstop's preferences and go to the "color management" tab. If you first click "Use the same settings for all objects" and then define the color settings you like you can then copy the settings automatically. Once the settings are defined the way you like them, click the "Use other settings for images" button. All the profiles, color management engine and rendering intent is automatically copied and applied. All you have to do is define a different rendering intent if you so choose.
Here is you're before and after pics with CMS enabled and what we want it to look like:

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See, isn't that much better? I told you what we did in PhotoShop would work everywhere else, note the Black Ink - US Sheetfed Coasted v2 profiles... Now what we can do is a profile to profile conversion just like in Photoshop! Now, a few notes about the other options. The Gray source profile. You get a choice of "generic" or "black and white". Might as well select "generic", doesn't matter too much. IF you happen to know which gray space is the input space you can go back to PhotoShop and save out the gray profile. Now which gray profile do you choose for the target space? The Black Ink - ZZZ profile you saved way back in Photoshop!

As for the RGB source profile, well that can get a little tricky. If you know for sure that the PDF came from a Mac then you would be better served picking "Adobe RGB(1998)". If you are sure that the PDF came from a PC then you may want to choose "sRGB". It depends on what's inside the PDF. If you have a lot of copy and pasted graphics, objects from Microsoft products (Publisher, Word, Excel) then sRGB is what you want. Or if you have digital pictures that are still RGB, odds are they are sRGB. It would be perfectly acceptable to use Adobe RGB(1998) for both Mac and PC files though. But your target profile should be Adobe RGB(1998).

CMYK, what are we going to do with you? Well you can pretty much bet that ANY CMYK image coming in is going to use "Photoshop 5 Default CMYK" or something very close to it. Face it, if someone has take then time to convert to CMYK, they are probably using something VERY close to "medium GCR", or Photoshop 5 Default CMYK. Both US Sheetfed Coated and SWOP v2 are pretty close to medium GCR/Photoshop 5 CMYK. You're mileage may vary, choose what works best for you (or you are most comfortable with!). I'm sure that I don't have to explain what to do for the target profile since this should bet the same as your Photoshop CMYK profile.

Since I originally wrote this you may prefer to define you destination profiles to ECI 2 v2 or ECI 2v4 for the source and destination RGB profiles and GRACoL 2006 #1 v2/v4 for destination CMYK. Of course if you're working in a SWOP workflow then you should look towards SWOP 2006 profiles. SNAP has their 2007 profiles available too.

LAB, LAB, LAB... Ahh forget about it! If you are converting LAB profiles, what are you doing here??

Pantone spot colors

Pantone color and other spot colors may present a problem when converting to CMYK in PitStop. Some of your Pantone colors may have their alternate color space defined as CMYK, some as Calibrated RGB. If a given color does have its alternate color space defined as CMYK then as part of your CMYK conversion action, or preflight profile, you should first convert it to the CMYK equivalent that is defined in the color. Check out the Action List Exchange for a action list! If the given color is defined as Calibrated RGB, then the conversion process will be affected by the presence of color management. You can convert directly to CMYK from Calibrated RGB if you like. Just remember that the conversion process will go through PitStop's color management system. Alternatively you can convert Calibrated RGB to RGB (your target RGB colorspace) and then convert to CMYK.

Be sure to test the conversion process first, never test on a live job! Remember the first three steps of any sucessfull venture are: Test, test again, test some more.

Summary

So what have we done? Well I haven't done anything! What you've done is establish a basic color workflow for all your Adobe apps and configured Pitstop to match that workflow. One word of advice for you Mac users. Open up your ColorSync utility and set your default profiles for documents to the same as what you setup Photoshop. Just to keep things consistent you know... It's okay to use "Automatic" or "Apple CMM".

If you are a Quark user, have you setup the color management defaults yet? If not, choose your monitor profile, don't worry about selecting a composite printer profile, and choose you CMYK space from Photoshop as your separations printer. On the RGB tab, choose Adobe RGB (1998) for solid colors and images. Go ahead and use "profile default" as the rendering intent. You DON'T want to choose "Color manage source to destination". All that should already be done in Photoshop! For the CMYK tab, it's the same setup but choose your separations printer profile for the CMYK profile. The idea being that you want to DISPLAY your separation space on the monitor, not make the conversion to the separation space.

Here's a word of advice for when printing out of Acrobat 6 Pro. In the advanced options you want to change the printer profile from "Printer/PostScript Color Management" to "Same As Source (No Color Management)". If you don't, well you'll be color managing the color managed files. And that could really mess up the color.

So here's the visual difference in a image. I know, it's shameless self promotion. But hey! It's my site and I'll plug if I want to! Click on the pics to download the actual PDF's. See how ugly it is? No, I'm not talking about me...

Don't forget to stop by my Enfocus forums! You can also email me direct at support )@( mattbeals )dot( com).

What's next?

If there is a particular issue that you are trying to resolve or have questions about please feel free to contact me directly. Color management in PitStop isn't quite so hard any more and can yield good results. If you conversion requirements are more sophisticated then please contact me for more information.

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