Do you honor or ignore embedded profiles?

[C2C]

But most people would rather not commit to change CMYK values of files submitted to them so they can protect themselves by saying "this is what you gave me" in case customer is not happy about final proof/printed color.

Yep. you supplied, we corrected and proofed,
you signed off.

[JRomano]

Guess there are 2 ways to look at it....

I dont want the customer saying....hey the other printer I use didnt have to charge me for a correction and proof why are you ? or your proof doesnt look like Joe's so why are you different ?

Lord knows therer were many versions of a SWOP proof, hopefully now the G7 thing is catching on and there will be less variations between Printers proof systems.

Most of our customers couldnt care less if the CMYK numbers have been changed,all they care about is if the proof looks good and if you can hit it on press.
I did say MOST ! some do not and communication is key when this comes into play.


John

[Gregg]

Thanks for all the feedback. It's interesting to see all of the different responses.

As somewhat of a follow-up question: does your shop apply a curve to the file or at the platemaking stage?

[mtnman]

We request that our customers supply us with untagged CMYK files. We will supply our press profile for soft proofing purposes but we are very close to SWOP standard so SWOP Standard V2 is usually sufficient. If your monitor isn't calibrated we will calibrate for you on a one time basis and suggest some calibration solutions.
We prefer that the customer sees the color that their going to get after converting from RGB to CMYK as cmyk is a smaller color space and often the customer is disapointed when those super clean RGB colors look muddier in CMYK. If we do the conversion the customer will have to pay for any additional color correction.
Our prepress system is set to automatically strip out any ICC profiles.
This system works very good for us, we run three shifts and a weekend shift running two heatset webs, lots of magazine work. We do almost no additional color correction.

mtnman

[Techboy]

Indeed, it's interesting to see such a diverse collection of answer on this topic along.

Main reason why I prefer the color conversion be done in-house using untagged/generic CMYK is because when we need to reprint a project a few years down the road and using a different printer then we may repeat the same process again.

Most of our printers DO NOT return the digital files they converted and corrected. We are left with the original in-house files. Essentially, old files with wrong color profile (*cough* RGB), that will need to be convert and fix again. To me, it's not an efficient nor effective method in managing repeatable projects.

That said, for one-time projects, sending files (tagged or untagged) to printers for conversion is less of an concern to me.

[Gregg]

Techboy, one thing to keep in mind is that if you plan on re-purposing your imagery down the road it is best to keep an RGB version. So as you say, a couple of years from now you may re-print a job at a different printer. The new printers profile/press may be capable of capturing a larger gamut of color than your original printer (even if you are only using a generic CMYK profile), and by you only having that CMYK version you run the risk of having clipped out those colors. Also, that may have a higher D-Max as well.

Granted, the potential larger color gamut that the new printer may have might not even be noticeable to the human eye. But, if you do have an RGB image from the beginning, it is good practice to keep a copy for re-purposing.

gregg