When to rasterise and when not to? When to convert to CYMK?

[DavidDoesAffinity]

DTP is something I use to support my business of 35 years in video production. Previously my DTP was on an old version of Quark running on XP.

It has been obvious from recent issues I encountered in Publisher that my older work flows need tuning for Publisher. I am very grateful for the help advice and support from the forum and Serif.

Rasterising. Previously my experience of rasterising was limited to taking a show title from a poster, designed by a "real" designer", rasterising the font and then using it in the video promo or TV ad. In Publisher all layers can be rasterised at print stage, so why rasterise an individual layer. It seems that once an individual layer is rasterised there is no turning back?

With regard to RGB imports into a CYMK document, should all assets be in either RGB or CYMK...back to video graphics where some CYMK imports cause issues when working in an RGB enviroment?

[stokerg]

Hi DavidDoesAffinity,

If you are designing for print then thats when you'd normally work in a CMYK workflow.  It all really depends on the printer doing the printing.  You might like to see this link:

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/designing-for-professional-printing/

As it covers designing for print.  If all of your work is going to be on 'screen' then i'd stick to RGB.  If you plan on printing, then see the above link  

Hope thats of some help  

[DavidDoesAffinity]

Thanks for link. In the article the key seems to be save as CMYK for print. Ideally when importing graphics should they be converted to CMYK or doesn't it matter as long as the export is to CMYK?

[thomaso]

Yes, the output color space(s) get defined on export. Until then, you can mix your inputs, but keep in mind that some RBG colors may differ from the (smaller) CMYK color space. Therefore, it is useful if you prefer to create a color or a swatch in CMYK – rather than RGB, HSL, or LAB.
(cmyk has 4 color channels whereas rgb has 3 only. that is why your video software gets issues with cmyk input – not because of the colors.)

When exporting to PDF, note that the PDF version has an influence on the colors, the number of color spaces and thus on the compatibility with different print workflows. Means that not every PDF version is useful or optimal for each content.