CMYK Colors

One of the features of our MBS Plugins is the handling of CMYK colors. If you work with computers most images are RGB with red, green and blue as colors. But if you work with printers, you may have seen CMYK images with cyan, magenta, yellow and black colors. That translates directly to the printer and each pixel specifies how much ink is needed for printing. When you print, the printer or the computer has somewhere to translate from RGB (display screen) to CMYK (printer).

DynaPDF

Our MBS DynaPDF Plugin handles CMYK in various places. First you can use any color space including CMYK for drawings. You can draw a line in cyan if you like. Also if you insert images, the image will be converted to the current color space and placed in the PDF. For CMYK images you better go and load a CMYK color space before you place the image. Else it is converted to your current colorspace which is normally RGB.

With 13.4 plugin we include a new CMYK example project to show how to place CMYK images. Especially with all the settings to make sure the image is included as is. This way DynaPDF does not change colors and not compress image for best results.

JPEG and TIFF

Our TIFF and JPEG plugins can handle CMYK images. Of course we can't easily give you a picture object. But we can give you scan lines or whole image as memoryblock. With 13.4 plugins we also include sample project here to show how to work with CMYK images.

LCMS, Apple ColorSync and Windows Color System

With MBS Plugin you have various color matching engines at hand. First we have LCMS which is a lightweight, but powerful color matching engine. It can load, edit and save ICC profiles and apply them in color transformations. Second we have Apple's ColorSync which also does color matching as well as Microsoft's Windows Color System. Both are of course platform dependent, but can be extended by plugins. And you can also use Adobe's engine.

Our plugin comes with examples showing how to load profiles and apply transformations. Both for picture object in RGB and memory blocks in other color spaces.

PictureMBS

The PictureMBS class in our LargePicture plugin can handle CMYK. Not with all images, but if you have a memoryblock with CMYK data, you can use our plugin class to apply functions like rotation or mirror here. Than you can get the memoryblock of the image back in CMYK and write it to a file.
With 13.4 plugins we include sample projects for that.

NSImage & CIImage

With Cocoa and CoreImage classes you also have color matching. In Cocoa application by default things are matched automatically. And CoreImage can also do this matching with using GPU so it is much faster.

If you have questions about CMYK pictures, please do not hesitate to contact us.