🚀 go-pugleaf

Kenny,

It's not surprising that you've had little luck getting profiles from your vendors, but when they say they strip out all profiles at the RIP, that's really irrelevant. You still need to know how to get to THEIR version of CMYK, and as you've seen, there is little or no standardization in the print world, even when they claim to be GraCol compliant. I've found too many who claim that but are not even close. If you know for sure they are, there are GraCol profiles you can download, but you'd have to test to see how good they are for your printers.

Your Adjustment Layer compensation, to me, seems not all that accurate and kind of a pain in the ass. I'll bet you find times where you thought it was going to work and in practice it was still off. There are just too many things that an actual real profile can compensate for that are beyond the roll of a simple Curves move. Of course, it depends on how picky your clients are.

You know, as we've spoken before, that I think you'd be best off making your own profiles for each vendor and separating on a job by job basis. It's not too bad if you are only using five or six vendors, and CS4 now supports Device Link Profiles, which might actually help.