Colour Profiles – Illustrator / Ps

[iknowdavehouse]

I know this isn’t strictly CSS chat but all of the below ends up defining hex and rgb values and I’m tired of the conflicts… I’m tired of not knowing exactly what’s going on.

I work in a multi disciplinary environment – if it’s a brand & web project we’d expect to work with print colours first so most of the material for a web project starts in CMYK.

Something like a logo would have specific Pantone / CMYK brand colours so we’d make a RGB version based on the closest match in illustrator.

So – when it comes to Photoshop I’ve tried all of these things:

Opened the CMYK .eps file and assigned an sRGB colour space when opening the file and let Ps do the conversion.

Opened the CMYK .eps file as CMYK and converted to RGB within Photoshop (Image Mode > RGB) then save for web clicking “convert to sRGB”.

Assigning an sRGB profile to the .eps in illustrator and **pasting** into an sRGB .psd (The only way I’ve found where the Illustrator and Ps files have the same RGB colour reference)

Assigning an sRGB profile to the .eps in illustrator and **placing** into an sRGB .psd

One of the interesting things about the above is that if you **paste** an sRGB .eps into photoshop it actually comes out a different colour than if you **place** in the sRGB .eps, even though they have the same colour profile.

So all of the above end up with different RGB values. In order to make the CMYK conversions look anything like they should I’ve used “convert to sRGB” in “save for web” as I mentioned above. However this feels extremely wrong, they are not the correct colours; they’re just a better visual representation of how they appear at their source – in this case CMYK in illustrator. If I don’t click “convert to sRGB” in this case they look so dull. What’s interesting is that some of these colours in the jpg’s / png’s have exactly the same hex value but look completely different on screen.

SO – after all of that I think the solution is to change everything to sRGB at source before importing it into any working sRGB document…

My questions are…

Why is pasting or placing an sRGB.eps into an sRGB .psd giving me two different RGB values for the same file?

What is “convert to sRGB” in Ps actually doing? When should this actually be used?

What’s your process?

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