CMYK vs. sRGB

[dlanter]

I just received an order of wall calendars for family gifts from VistaPrint. I know, VistaPrint is not exactly a pro quality lab but I have ordered calendars the last 3 years from them with no problems and the price was hard to beat. Anyway, 12 of the 13 photos in the calendar printed great but 1 photo came out with colors way off and most detail was lost. I have already been in contact with VistaPrint and they are going to do a reprint for free but said that I should have submitted the photos in CMYK profile instead of the sRGB. With the software I have, Lightroom & PSE8, I am not able to convert to CMYK so I have to take a chance on sRGB again. Not knowing what caused the problem I replaced the offending image with a different photo.

The photo that came out so badly is a blue flower with the frame completely filled with different tones of blue. My question is could it be the fact the photo is completely blue that caused the problem? Would the different tones of blue not translate correctly from sRGB to CMYK? This seems strange to me but all of the other photos have very little or no blue in them and they printed fine.

[picman]

About 1/3 of the way down this page Adobe Photoshop: The Complete Guide: Part 2 - ThinkCamera Features is a graphic comparing the different color spaces. Those pretty blues just don't exist in cmyk.
Sometimes those conversions to cmyk get ugly.

[dlanter]

Thanks for the info Brian. I didn't realize there was such a big difference between rgb & cmyk. It makes sense now that it affected the blue photo so drastically.