On the off-chance that someone still reads the Design Discussion forum, I have a bit of a dumb question. Early on in my time at my job over a decade ago, one of the first things I was taught when it came to photo editing in Photoshop is that you save in CMYK color and as a TIF for print and you save in RGB color and as a JPG for online. Does this really still matter, or it an outdated rule that was taught and passed along for older technology? To be honest, I have been editing and saving photos for print as RGB/JPGs for a long time and my pages have helped win statewide awards, so I'm just more curious if this would take my page design to yet another level.
Layout-wise: Saving as a JPG means you can't do layers, etc. Format-wise: I think a lot of it comes down to your presses and how good they are with color.
That makes sense. When I started, we had a pretty old press in-house, which probably explains why it was part of the editing regimen. Now, we ship it off like basically every other paper in America.
If you are using InDesign and exporting press quality pdf files to the site that does the printing, the file format of the photo is less important because InDesign will convert the image to CMYK to create the print separations. The more important aspect of RGB vs CMYK might be in the editing of the image. Color adjustments for images that will be published for screens should be edited in RGB because that’s how they’re seen on the screen: emitted in red, green and blue light. Color adjustments for images to be printed on a CMYK printer should be made in CMYK because that’s how they’ll be viewed on a page printed with four inks. But PhotoShop or whatever app is used needs to be calibrated to the printer’s specifications for the results to be accurate. If you are happy with the color quality coming out of the press, whatever settings are being used are probably fine. If you’re not satisfied with the printed results, a conversion with the printer would probably be more important than the choice of file format.
I started sending all photos to press in color because they'll come out as color on our e-edition and we get more readers there. If they look janky in print, I'll do the time-honored tradition and blame the press.
Every printer I’ve dealt with needs the images in CMYK. The book printers I’ve used have color profiles to download for each press that makes matching my computer to their press for proper color a snap. I convert images from RGB to CMYK one by one in InDesign.
We don't paginate ourselves any more (that's a gripe for another day), so I just attach images to the files and let them worry about it down the line. But yes, press run is almost always CMYK. RGB is fine for web.
