Trying to render color on the monitor that's CMYK equivalent

[Eric F.]

I occasionally design postcards for advertising, previous batches were color OK. This new company requests the output to be set to CMYK format. I initially sent them a regular PDF file for a prototype. The tan came out green and ugly, photos are OK. I then got into the custom color I used for tan, and see the option of entering it's perameters into a CMYK form. Will clicking CMYK be all that I need to do to make it print accurate, or is my RGB monitor always going to substantially vary? The low res. example of the file I am referring to is found at http://www.aerialphotographyservices.com/postcard
The card I got has a greenish tan background.

Thanks for any advise.

[acknak]

I don't think you're on the right track.

When a print shop asks for "CMYK" they're usually asking for a specific type of color separation, where your graphic file is made up of four separate layers, one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The printing process then recombines those four layers to make the final colors.

OOo cannot output color separations at all, so I don't think it's going to work for you. If I were you, I'd ask whether they could use a plain, unseparated PDF file.

You can check around to see if there's anything that can create the separations for you, from either a PDF file, or a Postscript file (Print to file).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_printing and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cmyk.

[Eric F.]

Thanks, I have made a red to yellow gradient card for now. 0 /255/255/0 on CMYK, pretty predictable red. And 0/0/255/0 for the yellow. We shall see. Thanks for the advice.