Compensating for magenta for offset jobs

[Adair]

Hi,
I'm a photographer, and am sending some work to a magazine (which will then go to offset printer of course). The designer has great creative designs skills, but isn't very pre-press savy, so I'm converting my files to cmyk for her (I've had other work published in this mag that looked muddy). I've talked to the printer who told me to set my destination space to "US WEB SWAPCOATED V2" which is pretty standard I think. I've also read that offset printers tend to be heavy on the magenta in fleshtones, and that you can't really go by your monitor-must "go by the numbers," making sure you have 2%-6% more yellow than magenta in the flesh tone areas. I've tried this and it looks horrible on my monitor-should I go by these numbers??
Any other cmyk conversion advice appreciated!
Thanks so much in advance

[Drorain]

When we send some product photos/scans to magazines they always yell at us to turn off ICC Profiles when we save the images. This might be one of the issues. Either way colors are going to shift on a four color press, you sound like you know that already though. It’s sometimes really hard to get colors to match because there is so many people this will go through, from you to the designer, to prepress to the pressman. When we go on press check we usually go down to the floor and advise them on what ink flows to back off on or to enhance, so control is limited especially since it can be changed right down to the print floor.

That being said, does the printer have specific color profiles they might be able to give you, if not they honestly are still the best people to go to for advice. I know one of the printers we used did run heavy on magenta for the purple/blue range of colors (crappy online printer) , perhaps it’s something similar.

[jimking]

If the press is running high on magenta I'd cut the magenta down not run up the yellow. Does this printer provide hard proofs?

[Adair]

No hard proofs. And they didn't give me a specific profile-just "US WEB SWAP COATED V2" you're right-these files do go through many hands...guess i'll have to chance it
Thanks guys