Paul,

I need to use CMYK because I'm printing the images onto canvas, and the printing machine requires those colours.

Are you printing to this "printing machine" from photoshop or is it a commercial service? If the latter, supply them with a CMYK file with the embedded color profile as a Tiff.

As far as the other, basically, you're assuming it's a CMYK/RGB shift when in fact, it may be a color management issue. From what I read in your post, you don't need CMYK for showing potential clients, you just need those colors represented. For printing you do, but for viewing, no.

The CMYK Gamut is smaller than RGB, and while SOME RGB colors lie outside that gamut, most will be in. So what you want is an accurate representation of the color when viewed by others - that is, if I understand correctly.

So the remedy is: Calibrate everyone's monitor who will view the image, or, live with the idea that there are some things you can't control, like, how your images will be displayed on other people's monitors.

Oh, you can get close. What *I* do, and I'm not saying it's the most sage approach, just that it seems to work, is the following. I use an sRGB color space and have a calibrated monitor. Give or take, the images I produce reasonably well, within a certain margin across the board. BUT... take it to an LCD screen and they're all washed out.

If I bring a color managed image into a color managed application, no problems. But the web, and (AFAIK) most Microsoft products are NOT color managed; neither is ACDSee. So they're going to see generic - no profile.

So you're best off, IMO, creating two images: one for print output with the CMYK Colors (provide as a tiff for example) and one that represents those colors well when you turn color management off in photoshop, or, if you're lucky, use sRGB as a color space and hope for the best.

Peace,
Tony

Paul_Smythe

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CYMK colour still looking like RGB colour in other applications