Adobe is delivering rather aged Euroscale printing profiles for the European market, e.g. the FOGRA28 profile that comes with the CS4 suite. Up-to-date color profiles for Euroscale printing are available free of cost from the European Color Initiative (ECI).
From the package of profiles that is available at the ECI downloads page you should use the ”ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI)” as a recommendable universal profile for Euroscale offset printing.
In Windows-XP you will want to store these profiles in a sub-folder of the Adobe profiles folder, e.g. in:
C:/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Color/Profiles/Recommended/ECI_Offset_2009/
From there they are readily available in the Color Settings dialogs of all programs of the Adobe suite.
In Windows 7 the above Profiles folder exists too, but profiles are additionally copied into another destination folder where all Adobe programs will try to find them (shown here including an ECI subfolder):
C:/Windows/System32/spool/drivers/color/ECI_Offset_2009/
Remember that you can use Adobe Bridge to set identical color preferences for all programs of your CS suite (instead of managing the settings in each program individually).
Hi,
I use the earlier version of this colour setting ‘ISO Coated v2 (ECI)’, as we found that the ‘ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI)’ version really messes up global and spot colours in Illustrator CS4 to CS6 running on Apple OSX. For instance: you save a document with Black as CMYK 0,0,0,100, when you re-open that document and take a look at the Black, it has changed to a mess of CMYK 67,74,61,95… Obviously no good for printing! Then imagine this happening to ALL of the spot or global colours in your colour swatch – horrible.
I hope that this helps – and that ECI sort it out. I wrote to them about it about 2 years ago and got no response.
Richard
Hi Richard,
interesting effect. I cannot reproduce this on my system (CS6 on Windows 7). I honestly do not understand how a profile can change CMYK color definitions within a source document (unless you are working in another color system than the one you are measuring in, e.g. you define your colors in CMYK but your document is set to internally use RGB, so the profile is involved in color conversions). Are you sure this is not the result of wrong document settings or a bad program setup?