Color transferal between programs

[John G]

Well, I've been working on some spreads in Illustrator, and I need to get the complete imageinto a .jpg or .pdf so as I cane-mail it or run off some prints at kinkos. I've been accomplishing this by either saving as pdf or eps in illustrator, and then importing them in photoshop (even using the ai files too). Everything is imported and exported cmyk. My problem is the colors appear different and sometimes things like gradients and some transparent boxes disappear (just plain get messed up).

Am I doing this completely wrong? Is there an easier way that I don't know?

Thanks for any help,
John



--John

http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~john/ <--some of my older stuff, but I'm always open to suggestions

[Silence04]

i've never once been able to have the correct colors when switching from illustrator/corel to photoshop... i found .eps to be the closest of all of them..... hmmm, or was it .tif?


http://www.jdcgraphics.net/banner.gif

[D-Zine]

Why do you need to import them into Photoshop? Kinkos has Illustrator and then you can just take in your .ai file and print it from that...right? If you need it CMYK you can set it to that in Illus and lose your last step with PS. Just output yer .ai file.

http://coastalcarousel.com/GDF/metatag3.jpg

[Mickey]

D-Zine is correct, You can convert all of your colors in your color pallet to cmyk and make sure you color mode is cmyk, then convert all of your fonts to outline, save as a pdf or eps and have kinkos print if off.

Be carefull with Illustrators transparency function it is a pain in the ass and has a lot of bugs. Never use it if your going to go to a traditional printer, All of my printers have run into trouble using it.

http://home.wi.rr.com/mygraphics/konceptcreative.jpg

[D-Zine]

Oh yeah..good point Mickey...outline all yer fonts!! A must...just saves from the hassle!

http://coastalcarousel.com/GDF/metatag3.jpg

[snypa]

kinko's?
i'd rather take a sharp stick in the eye than go there again
had very bad experiences printing there as a student

...spending a dime, while earning a nickel

[PrintDriver]

Don't expect PMS colors doing any of ^ that^. Be happy with what comes out of Kinko's printers.

As for transparency, I wouldn't trust Kinkos to output a square with a single fill let alone a transparency.

It took almost a year but all my large format outsource printers have workarounds to deal with transparency issues all the way thru CS. And they don't have print nooBs pushing the button. (no offense meant to anyone who may actually be 'on the ball' at Kinkos).

Why don't you export to .jpg from Illustrator? You don't want to be printing from a .jpg though.

PrintDriver is a large format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

[John G]

The problem is, is when I have illustrator export to anything else, the colors are already screwed up right off the bat after this. I can get the color problem almost corrected in Photoshop, but not the stripes. Am I going to run into this same stuff happening when I get it printed with the .ai file (4 color offset)?</o:p>
</o:p>
The Kinkos here doesn't carry Illustratorexcept for in the back (plus its version 8 or 9), which usually they throw a hissy fit if you need to use it (plus something almost always goes wrong with it at some point). I need to get a proof for the printers and with one of the newer printers there I can get the colors to match almost exactly what is on screen. Most of my issues are just in trying to export it and the file/colors/transparency get messed up there.</o:p>
</o:p>
I guess I'll have to go in at night and try printing out in Illustrator I guess (they're really jerks about using Illustrator during the day).</o:p>
</o:p>
Thanks for the help,</o:p>
John</o:p>


--John

http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~john/ <--some of my older stuff, but I'm always open to suggestions

[Benjamin]

I might be really misunderstanding all this but isn't it just to do with colour management and colour spaces setup in illustrator and photoshop? If the colour management is set up the same in the 2 programs then surely any colour will appear the same when imported...

http://www.jackfruitdesign.com/
Om Namah Shivaya

[ElKootcho]

Benjamin said...
I might be really misunderstanding all this but isn't it just to do with colour management and colour spaces setup in illustrator and photoshop? If the colour management is set up the same in the 2 programs then surely any colour will appear the same when imported...

I know this is an old post but just to clarify, Benjamin is absolutely correct. Color shift occurs when Photoshop and Illustrator color spaces are different. Go into the color preferences of each program and make sure that they are identical.

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