My last article was the theory behind what we are going to do in this article, so you might want to read it first and get your settings done etc. We will color an illustration in RGB-color mode and export it as CMYK. I will not go deep into color management and will assume you have a calibrated monitor and know the basic stuff for doing work for print.

Before you start coloring, set Preview of Color profile as in the image below.

Also take care that preview is on and you see the color profiles name in the headline of your image

And if you haven’t set up which CMYK profile to use at export when the time comes, do that also now from File/Preferences/Color conversion.

Professional printers here in Finland ask me to use Fogra profiles almost every time. Coated or uncoated depending on the paper. Be sure to find out which profile your printer wants you to use, as these things vary from printer to printer, country to country.

Then the coloring:

As stated in the previous article, it’s no good coloring in CMYK mode in Manga Studio. Here are two CMYK screen proofs. The first one is done in Photoshop, where everything works and the second one in MS, where it obviously doesn’t work. The colors have become more darker and muted than they actually are:

Another image for comparison. I’ve done the colors on the left in Manga Studio using Coated Fogra preview space. I’ve exported the image with the same Fogra profile as tif. When I mix those colors with the same values in Photoshop, using the same Fogra profile, I get a different result. (The colors on the right side). As you can see, especially the magenta ones made in MS have been affected badly.

There have been views on the internet that MS mixes black in all CMYK colors even if you don’t use the K-channel. Whatever it does, it does it wrong. The magenta color in my image in the upper left corner was made with 75% M and 0% C, Y and K. But when opened and measured in Photoshop I get a mix of M, C and Y!

But let’s get back to our illustration. When you are ready, flatten the image and File-> Export (Single layer) as TIF.

Here are my settings for the export (MS will use the CMYK profile you set in Color conversion (Preferences) for the expression color.):

I also converted a copy of the illustration to CMYK in Photoshop and compared the results. PS on the left, MS on the right. Looking good!