Hey All,
I’m a newby to all things 3D. I work mainly in Photoshop and Indesign. Almost all my work is output to CMYK. I just used Zbrush for the first time on a project. In the past if I’m working on a RGB doc I can usually change color modes in PS and with a little levels and saturation clean up get the CMYK conversion looking pretty close. With my exported PSD document from Zbrush however as I try and convert the color is whacked! It’s flat and washed out with no dynamic range or bit depth, even after a converstion to 16 bit color. Reds are a misty pink, dark reds are orange, blacks are a mid gray. Working on saturation, hue or color balance makes it worse. Any idea on first of all fixing my present doc without starting again and then in future working in Zbrush in a CMYK color space?
Cheers!
One thing that you can try is, after your Best Render activate the Adjustments in the Render palette and tweak your color/contrast/brightness settings before exporting.
Another option might be to use materials with the High Dynamic Range modifier and adjust it up a bit before rendering.
No matter what, CMYK pretty much always looks washed out compared to RGB – but that’s especially true when viewed on the monitor.
I can’t remember positively off hand…if cymk is included but check out Cameyo & Marcus’ ZColor plugin…if nothing else you can save a palette of colors that will save you some work later on in PS and by keeping them the same it makes it easier to create actions in ps to quickly get you where ya need to be when converting. A bit of a work around that may work for you.
I have to do this frequently but have got things pretty well worked out for my system and printer and also for my system and the printers at work (ugh all of them completely different animals of course)
What RGB color space are you using in Photoshop? I use Adobe 1998 and have no profiles mismatch between ZBrush and PS. Remember you can use ZApplink to switch between programs - it’s very useful if you’re making adjustments in both apps.
As with any document that’s going to end up as CMYK it pays to use less than saturated colors from the start, rather than making adjustments later - at least that’s the way I do it. This is certainly more difficult in ZBrush but not especially so. You might find my ZSwatch plugin useful (see signature). You can store color palettes with it and it has a saturation slider (and others) for on the fly color mixing.