[unseen_life]

As a long time PS user, I'm used to being able to determine RGB>CMYK mixes for black density etc., and seeing those accurately (reasonably) on screen.

Painter 8 simply has "Generic CMYK Profiles" for the "Professional" setup...
how do I know what I'm getting, and how do I adjust it to my preferences?

Also, Photoshop has an out of gamut warning box that lets you select a color that will print properly... is there anything like this in Painter? If not, how do you avoid painting something that won't print?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Pat]

The short answer is that you can't. The long answer is more like you probably won't need to.

Painter's ability to control ink densities is weak. You're better off working in Painter and moving your file into PS to CMYK it. That way you can control maximum ink densities, dot gain compensation and UCR and GCR printing strategies. You can preview it there as well.

The good news is that Painter's brush engine stays in gamut as much as possible. It can be forced out of gamut, but the engine itself strives to work in gamut. Also, since the brush engine doesn't lay down mathmatically pure color like Photoshop tends to, but rather anti-aliased and optically dithered colors, color shifts are far less extreme. In short, you're not as likely to get suprising color shifts as in Photoshop.

Painter doesn't have a CMYK color mixer either, so you can't stay in gamut that way. However, there are CMYK color sets you can download and those should keep you honest. Personally, I've never needed them --if you just avoid the most saturated colors on the color wheel, you'll be good to go.

-Pat

[V Shane]

I work in Painter 7/8. The thing i have done that helps considerably, is scanning printed images that have a huge range of color based on temperature,paintings etc..... but printed. I then use Painter to capture and make a color pallette library based on these scanned images. Hence this gives me a CMYK advantage better than normal in Painter. Also before I do a "capture" I make sure to adjust the scanned image in photoshop to make sure the screen version matches almost exactly the actual published picture in my hand that I jsut scanned. Then I bring it into Painter and have it create a swatch library from the whole scanned image.

Hope that helps, for me its decreased the amount of color change in my transfers from P7/8 to Photo7 RGB to CMYK by at least 60%.

Try it, its tedious, but you'll come to depend on those librarys, maybe.
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