How to color art using CMYK colors in Xara

[handrawn]

mainly because as ernie said the physics of light and pigment are different nothing we can do about that only use the technology we have, it will never be perfect but its better than it was; that said i cant think of a monitor less than £400/500 that would be acceptable to me, and for the animation graphics i do where colour fidelity is paramount the cintiq 24 has excellent adobe rgb gamut, but they sure 'aint cheap and excessive if you dont need to draw with it

[ernie-f]

Do you believe in miracles? LOL - but seriously, when I worked in printing, it was a given that our monitors NEVER gave an accurate picture of the colors that would be produced in any printer we had, no matter what age, make or how often we calibrated anything (we usually calibrated the printers daily). And it all just seems so stupid. Why isn't color printing, digital at least, standardized by now? What a pain in the tuchus!

Color printing is standardized. For professional printing, colour profiles



have been developed for certain printing processes (offset and digital printing) which enable the best conversion from RGB to CMYK for the substrate used.

Printing with your own office printer usually has only one or two generic color profiles for plain and photo paper. But also the home office printer could be calibrated
and provided with a color profile and thus adjust the results.
However, since so many factors such as pigmentation of the inks, whiteness of the paper, paper surface, emission/reflection of the paper etc. contribute to the
printing result, it will always be only an approximate result.



The color gamut of e. g. rgb is higher than the achievable result in CMYK printing.
That's why you need a working colour management and the knowledge of the colour masters as well as a large portion of expertise and experience to e. g. make
reproductions of watercolours and oil paintings for art books like I do.

[handrawn]

true again

so it's still dead reckoning as far as what you see on the screen compares to the print