[Scribus] Cinepaint and CMYK

[Craig Ringer]

John R. Culleton wrote:
> I am contemplating using Cinepaint instead of Gimp because of the 
> availabilty of cmyk.  In fact I am part way through the install 
> process (that ol debbil missing prerequisites blew up ./configure.)
> 
> Before I chase my tail further how close is the functionality of 
> Cinepaint to Gimp? Are there important features I am giving up in the 
> move?

Honestly, the biggest question you need to ask is "how badly do you
really need a CMYK image editor?"

DTP apps these days can take care of RGB->CMYK conversions and produce
good results. Modern RIPs can do even better RGB->CMYK conversions if
you're dealing with one of the limited number of printers in the world
who've actually profiled their presses and set their RIPs up
appropriately. Do you _really_ need such detailed control that you
expect to make post-colorspace-conversion adjustments to your images?

I won't claim that CMYK image editing is never useful or necessary. For
many users, though, you can get by just fine without.

Some people will say "... only if you have decent colour profiles."
That's sort of true, in that you should only expect good results with
your CMYK bitmap editor if you have good colour profiles there too, ie
both methods have the same limitation. Historically apps like Photoshop
had generic colour conversion routines that were somewhat decent at
producing CMYK output that might print vaguely OK - and printers were
pretty good at tweaking at their end so it actually worked. These days
generic profiles are significantly improved, and the availability of
printer-specific profiles can permit very good results with very little
fuss.

So ... do you really need to hand-convert all your images to CMYK?

--
Craig Ringer