CMYK, gamut and scanning art

[James Francis]

Hi everyone,

I've read a lot on my problem, but I'm not closer to answers - other than manually and tediously making HSL adjustments on my image.

I have traditional artwork made in watercolour but with pretty bright and saturated colours. I've scanned and prepped these for print, but as you'd know, the CMYK conversion dulls the images. Also, when I do a soft layer gamut test, I get a lot of greys.

Now, this isn't a digital artwork, so I can't have used a CMYK profile from the start. Nor does my scanned (Canoscan Lide 400) scan into CMYK.

I have found one solution: to make minor HSL adjustments to specifics colours. But I'm not kidding when I say to adjust one type of blue requires 64 individual adjustments (it's watercolour, so the colours have a lot of texture) as well as tweaking the vibrance. I'm adjusting around -2% saturation to keep within the gamut and not lose more saturation. I know I can make fewer adjustments if I go for a higher range, but it's sucking the life out of the colours.

Now, I don't expect to replicate what I see on screen, but I do expect to get a little of that colour punch that I can see in the traditional art. The above gets me there, but it's hours and hours of work.

Assuming I have to stick to US (SWOP) v2, what are my choices? Will I need to manually adjust for each tiny colour variation? Is there something I can do at the scan stage?

I'm using Photo and Publisher, and doing the CMYK proofing/conversion in Designer. I see a lot of talk about using Photoshop and Indesign with Bridge to get a pleasing result. Is this possible in Affinity?

thank you,

James

[thomaso]

Can you upload a sample image in RGB + your CMYK result? It might help to get an impression of the possibly critical colours.

There are definitely certain saturated color areas in RGB (cyan, green, pink) which don't exist in CMYK. If your watercolor inks do use those then you can't avoid a saturation loss or color shift in CMYK. Then maybe a 6-color (inkjet) print will achieve better results because of its additional inks especially for these color ranges.