Photography Format help????

Question

I have a Canon Digital Rebel XTi. It only supports RGB color scheme. I have been asked to do a photo shoot but the requirements are CMYK with a DPI of 300 or greater AND in .tiff format... I used Photoshop CS2 to change the photo to CMYK and everything was OK until I used the paint program to change the photo from JPEG to TIFF, then the dpi went from 300 to 96...... Help PLEASE!!!!!

Answer 1

So they are trying to get you to do the pre-press work too ... as a photographer?

Sheesh!!!!

Tell them that you can supply them Adobe RGB colour space images converted from RAW to a TIFF in PC or Mac configuration, but they will have to do the CMYK conversion since you do not know what paper they are going to be printing on so don't know how to set the gamma for each layer.

CMYK is done at the printers just before burning the plates for publication.   They should know this.

Converting from JPEG to TIFF is going the wrong direction ... they should know this too.  If I were you I would get paid before I gave them anything ... they don't seem to know what skills they get with a photographer and where post production is supposed to take over ... certainly not in the hands of a shooter.

FYI ... if you start manipulating an image using a program like Photoshop, don't switch midstream to a different program.  Artifacts form one program can leak over to the files which cannot be corrected using a different photo program ... since Photoshop is the standard of the industry, stick with it ... at least when selling images to publishers

Answer 2

For publication first switch to shooting in RAW format, not JPG.

Then convert the RAW files to TIF. While it is possible to convert RGB to CMYK in Photoshop, it's usually up to the printer to do that as they know best which settings to use for their printing process. Hopefully they know more about hairstyling than digital printing.

Answer 3

I agree. It's unusual to require CMYK files from the photographer as there are toning considerations as well as specialized profile settings that need to be adjusted, depending on the specific printing method. I, too, have been asked to provide CMYK's in the past, but always by someone who knows only enough about photography to be wrong.

I would not worry about the resolution going from 300 to 96 as long as the file size stays the same. As said above, though, there is no need to switch applications to do this, so stick with Photoshop.