Les writes: Re: RGB printing : JD you may find it but you will also find it to be an inferior product on the whole. : Card stock is pretty sturdy stuff but printers that may use ink jet or other system may have a short run, but they just don't hold up too well for actually mailing them. The CMYK printing works better for actual postcards and are pretty rugged and will look decent once they get to the destination. : Most of the card stocks that are used for RGB printing are a little to tender. : : Les : mohadib: Hallo, Thanks for all the input. I really do want tough postcards but getting CMYK and my photo to look right on my Linux box is not going so well. Looks super in RGB though... Anyway, thanks again for the input everyone. people - CMYK is the realm of Graphic Designers and is a 4 colour printing process so don't expect a totally faithful repro of your photographs! In fact, unless *you* the creator of the image can soft proof against the gamut and profile of the printer in question, don't expect anything like your photograph! Remember the issues photographers had getting images to print in books/magazines, getting business cards made up etc in years gone by ? That was all due to the way GD's work with colour and the fact that 'colour' is a whole different thing to what we photographers know as 'colour'. In the Olde Dayes CMYK was what a printer worked in from scratch since those were the colours they'd be getting out of the printer .. software was setup to work CMYK and RGB conversions were a nuisance to the point GD's demanded photographers present their images in CMYK as (figuring photographers understood colour the way they do) they figured the photographer would have done the soft proofing and would have been happy with a RGB>CMYK conversion they did themselves.. but GD's and Photographers really, really treat colour very differently! Nowadays we have 'photo printers' with bigger gamuts, more colours (CMYPMPCRGB for example!) and one big advantage - the *print driver* can do a fantastic job of doing the RGB> CMYPMPCRGB conversion it's self! You *can* do a RGB>CMYK conversion in the software but be warned, unless you have your monitor and software calibrated and set to soft proof (understand you'll be seeing your soft proof of a CMYK image through an RGB monitor!) you'll NOT see a version of what you'll get. Also if you try to hard proof your print driver may 'fix' the image and not give you a true representative of what the CMYK printer will finally produce. .. and then any PS profiles present can really muck things up further ! Print companies which have their software set up to allow RGB>CMYK conversions through the RIP will often if not always give better results than a printer who demands a CMYK image. k
