Addressing Inkscape's Biggest Problem: CMYK

Inkscape is amazing. There's lots of things I love about Inkscape. However, there's one flaw it has that I'll be addressing in this video, and that is working with CMYK color profiles.

When designing something for print, a CMYK color profile is required to ensure that your design looks the same in print as it does on your screen. Unfortunately, Inkscape doesn't yet have the ability to work in the CMYK environment, but there are a few workarounds that I'll be exploring in this video.

Video Breakdown:

00:00 Intro
00:48 Difference between CMYK and RGB
03:49 ExportPDFCMYK extension
04:37 Scribus
05:43 Krita
06:50 RGB2CMYK
07:41 Illustrator and Affinity

Links:



Intro song: "In Da Mood" by Combustibles, used with written permission

[pauledmann]

I'm a printer who has used Inkscape, Illustrator and Corel over the years. I love inkscape and have used it successfully. In my experience, no software will truly represent the printed final. This is why we do printed proofs. So much depends on the screen it's on, even when using Illustrator. I've displayed the same electronic proof on multiple displays and get different representations on each. Even printed on different equipment types give different results using the same cmyk defs.You have to do printed proofs on the machine that will produce the final until it's where you want it.

[SD_Marc]

I've been in printing for 25 years. We used to convert RGB support files individually before prepping for print. But, now ALL files come in RGB, unless it's from an old-school design house, or very experienced designer. We have software now that converts all of the on the fly. But, yes, your point that you may not get back something that looks like your PDF on the screen is right on. Also, never in my career has any place I've worked rejected a file for not being CMYK, or spot colors. Especially nowadays as print slowly dies.

[VR_Layno]

Oh Gosh! That’s is why I’m always bugged with my printed results, you really helped sort that out Nick!

[tsizzleowns]

I swear, Nick is the best teacher when it comes to stuff like this! Thanks Nick!

[tenani]

The Irony calling the program Inkscape, but the output can't be reproduced by Ink. Should call themselves Lightscape instead.

[beachforestmountain]

Thanks Nick, your tutorials are some of the best I've ever seen in any subject - so clear and straight to the point.

[stephenallen]

Thank you very much for this awesome video. I'm not a designer but I love Inkscape, and look forward to learning from your tutorials. Many thanks again.

[matthewdukes]

There's also filters> color> nudge CMYK, simulate CMYK, color shift. Or extensions> color, and there's more adjustment options in there for shifting your color pallets closer to CMYK. Nudge CMYK and color shift both give you adjustment menus like the hue, saturation, and brightness menu

[tarundmail]

This video is 3 years old. Did Inkscape solve this problem in the current version 1.3.2 ?

[miscible]

Thanks you for doing this video. I asked a question about how Linux users got around the CMYK issue on your review of Affinity video. Up until that point I wasn't aware Inkscape didn't do CMYK. You are a great help to the community, thanks again.

[anhtaynhata]

Has this changed? Because I see an option in Inkscape Extensions> Color> Replace color> CMYK. Then if I click on stroke and fill it shows the CMYK color specifics. When it adjusted the changes were so minimal that I am not even sure if it worked. But the website option was, extremely poor. I wish my printers would have just done the needful and imported my file and clicked a few buttons in Illustrator but oh well, at least I am learning new stuff. I am NOT a graphic designer AT ALL!

[medmedin]

There's an easy way to use CMYK colors inside Inkscape 1.0 with Scribus 1.5.5 and produce a vector PDF without manually replace each color :
0- Create new Inkscape file.
1- Link a CMYK profile in Document Properties> Color section.
2- Save the document as Inkscape SVG format then close it and reopen it again.
3- When you choose colors for fill/stroke select CMS tab in Fill and Stroke dialog and select your CMYK profile, then adjust the C, M, Y, and K attributes. Don't use RGB or HSL or HSV or CMYK or Wheel tabs to select your colors.
4- Save your finished SVG file.
5- Open the SVG file directly inside Scribus, and you will find that Scribus recognize your CMYK colors because you used CMYK ICC profile inside Inkscape so the colors are stored with additional "icc-color" tags inside the SVG file.
6- Export to PDF and choose in Export dialog> Color > Output intended for Printer.

[TheHungryPig]

For me, using only CMYK color while designing and exporting using the extension worked flawlessly. Thank you so much for this video!

[timelordtardis]

The RGB vs CMYK colour spaces very nicely explained and illustrated I might add.

[keithdmaust]

Wow. Immensely impressed with your deep knowledge of CMYK and supporting work-around software! Subscribed ;)

[niteynite]

Looks like I might have to purchase Affinity Designer sooner than I thought. Forever grateful to Inkscape though, for giving me the opportunity to learn vector design. I hope more people will toss a coin to the project. Maybe some funds could be used to hire a freelance dev to implement CMYK support.

[JosueMartinez-wwvj]

Since inkscape is open source lets all email them with this request.

[MarcJeanmougin]

Hi ! Inkscape dev here.

«(s)RGB is the only colorspace Inkscape supports» is not completely accurate. However it's true that it's a very convoluted and *very* error-prone process below. Also a bit buggy (especially in 1.0, iirc it has a major bug there)

To set the colorspace In Inkscape you can go to Document Properties -> Color first to add it to the document, then *all* your colors must be set *not* in the CMYK tab of fill&stroke (which uses sRGB but with C, M, Y, K sliders), or by using the palette (defined in #rrggbb colors), but *exclusively* in the "CMS" tab of Fill&Stroke. Then, when you save your file, you end up with a perfectly valid color-managed SVG file, which will not get you far (probably no one accepts this kind of file***). The libraries Inkscape uses for rendering and managing PDFs are unable to write a color-managed PDF, so your (FLOSS) options are :
- The Scribus way is the only one that can actually take advantage of the CMS information you give in Inkscape. It will import the colors you defined in a CMYK space, and can write them into a color-managed PDF file. It's true that not all SVG parts are supported, though. The fact that you can use a monitor calibration profile in Inkscape means that you should, with this, actually preview the file you'll produce with just minimal scribus involvement*.
- There are indeed no easy ways, as far as I know, to directly produce, from Inkscape, a tiff or jpeg color-managed file without any automated conversion which might screw things up (which might not be a big problem as we are trying to produce vector files in Inkscape, so if we can have a good pdf, it's usually ok - but admittedly not ideal). This /might/ be solved by switching the renderer library we use to e.g. Skia, but that's far from an easy task.


(sorry for the long and somewhat technical post)

*: An extension (much WIP) will be available in the next version to "save as PDF with Scribus" (if scribus is installed) to automate this without going with Inkscape internal libraries
**: (I much prefer the term "color-managed" than "CMYK" because CMYK, without the color profile information, is a mostly meaningless term. I can't tell you what a CMYK file is or should look like without the information that you're actually talking about a SWOP_TR005_coated_5 file)
*** : you can see those colors defined in the svg file will look like this: style="fill:#00566c icc-color(Artifex-CMYK-SWOP-Profile, 0.85949486, 0.14385736, 0.1358258, 0.60546374)" for instance (with a fallback RGB value so that browsers know what to display)

[lemapp]

Back in the 1980’s, Adobe released a series of white papers on their then brand new technology, PostScript. In the White Book (the papers were published with colored covers), there is a lengthy discussion on converting RGB to CYMK. In an overly simplified terms, colors with the same shade of grey become that grey with the other colors (CYM) lighten by that amount. It’s complex I practice, the white paper describes the full process.

[enmimaquinaandaba]

Unfortunately, the Linux extension is not available anymore, the link seems to be down. Nevertheless, you can use Scribus which is a free software PDF editor that can export files in CMYK.