Show some love to the scientists out there; gamut warning please

[wooly_bugger]

We biologists are also making our own RGB composite images from scratch all the time, and this type of functionality is critical.  Our workflow often begins with a series of 12 or 16 bit grayscale images that are 'massaged' into 8 bit images and, ultimately, RGB composite images.  Therefore, the ability to copy/paste into the channels of an RGB image, as well as some form of channel mixing is very useful. I get the impression from other discussions that channel functionality is broken for the moment, but will be fixed.

 

 Where we really suffer, however, is in sending our data to scientific journals for print publication.  Since art directors often have little idea what our composites are really supposed to look like (the color or contrast of a mitotic spindle, anyone??), we are stuck (as image nonprofessionals) trying to proof our images on our own a bit before we send them off.  Just have a look at any major scientific journal to see the lack of image workflow training (that is, we don't get any image workflow training...).  Since we don't get access to the publishers icc profiles or anything useful to a commercial imaging professional, we have to play with generic CMYK conversions and/or soft proofing tools to ensure our microscopy images fit more or less into a generic CMYK gamut.  So we get self-taught in adjusting saturation and hue of our RGB images to make this work out...  At least, some of us are self taught.  Others simply send their raw, saturated RGB composites off and don't care about the printed result.  Of course, I'm supposed to be focused on my cell biology work (at least, that is what I'm paid for), and not so much on image colorspace workflows (in my copious spare time).  In the old days, we would take actual photos of our specimens, and include a hardcopy with our manuscripts.  That way, we never had to talk to the art directors, and vice versa.  But I digress...  

 

While it is true that the scientific journal publishers as a whole expect me to send them straight up RGB images for publication, we still need a way to ensure that they will likely look halfway reasonable in print form.  The art directors at the respective journals may or may not have patience for a lot of back and forth with us scientists over our images.  For this reason, we would very much appreciate some form of 'out of gamut' warning and (at least generic) CMYK conversion to help make our publication workflow less frustrating.