Forum How do I...?

Query re. color profiles

blakequarterly
I'd like to ask if color profiles are now included in PDFs generated by Prince. I saw a post that indicated they were not included as of version 5, but perhaps the situation has changed.

I ask because I will be publishing my document (my first created with Prince) through the HP print-on-demand service MagCloud. In their documentation they say

"When your MagCloud PDF is sent to an HP Indigo digital press for printing, the press will convert any non-CMYK content to CMYK prior to printing. The press does this conversion automatically based on the color profiles that have been embedded in your file. If there are no color profiles embedded in your file, this conversion will be based on the default color settings of the press, which could result in a color output that is different from what you see on screen.
Therefore, to ensure you get the best output possible, we encourage you to follow these color guidelines when creating and inserting content in your MagCloud PDF:
• Images you place into your document, whether from a digital camera or stock photography website, should be left in their original color space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc) with the corresponding color profiles embedded in the final PDF."

My images are RGB, but I'm worried that if there is no color profile embedded, they may not print well, which would be unfortunate for our journal, since it covers art.

Thanks,
Sarah Jones
mikeday
If your images are JPEG files, they will be embedded exactly as-is in the final PDF file, so any color profile will be included as well. However, I'm not sure if that is sufficient, or if Prince needs to explicitly extract the color profile from the image, and duplicate it somewhere else in the PDF file. We can take a look at this.

The other option is to convert your images to CMYK first before embedding them in the PDF file, but this might require too much work for you, depending upon the number of images and the tools you have available.
blakequarterly
Thanks for the response, Mike. I will run it by MagCloud if I can and see what they say.

Sarah