Hi all!
I've got a bit of technical question for you...
These days I do all my client work in Procreate and if needed I'll finish up the piece in Photoshop if it needs converting to a special colour mode or if the file is getting too big for Procreate to handle. This has never been an issue before but recently I've had a client ask to be sent layered CMYK files.
As you may know Procreate's CMYK mode sucks and it doesn't really allow you to export anything without fudging up the colours (I know from bitter experience haha). So what I usually do is work in RGB then if the client wants a CMYK file I will export the file to Photoshop where I can then flattened the image and convert to a CMYK profile. Using this method the colours are pretty spot on 90% of the time, with a few adjustments needed the other 10% of the time. However, if I try to convert to CMYK before flattening the image it makes the colours look pretty weird the majority of the time. In my limited understanding this is partly because there are a lot of layer modes in both Procreate and Photoshop that simply don't work in the CMYK colour space, for example overlay layers.
The client insisted on fully layered documents in CMYK and I warned them the colours would look a bit dodgy but they told me their designer would colour correct them. A week or so after sending the layered CMYK files they come back to me complaining that the files look weird and the designer can't fix them
I tried to explain to them why this had happened and proposed some solutions. In the end what I did was I sent them print ready flattened CMYK files that had been converted using the more reliable method that preserves the colours. I also sent fully layered RGB files if they still wanted to edit anything before printing they could do so then flatten and convert the files themselves.
They seem to be happy with this solution but this whole process has got me thinking of how I can avoid this issue in the future.
Is it normal for clients to want layered CMYK files? Is it even strictly necessary for them to have?
If so is there a better way of converting from RGB to CMYK while preserving layers?
Thank you for reading this far! I'm really curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this.