Clip Studio Paint and CMYK? Yes!
I’ve seen a lot of misinformation out there that CSP can’t work in CMYK. That’s incorrect. If you’re making an illustration for print, you’ll want to see what your illustration looks like in CMYK first. Some colors that look great in RGB just wash out and look bad in CMYK, and this will help you see what’s going on.
You can view your illustration in CMYK by going to View and selecting Color Profile and then Preview Settings:
It’ll bring up this dialogue box, which is where the magic happens:
Under Profile for preview is where you select CMYK. If your printer has not specified a color profile to you (and most don’t really care unless you’re a big time client getting thousands of prints) then it’s safe to select CMYK: U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 from the list as a default go-to. Hit OK and you’re good to go! Your art is now displaying in CMYK mode, easy as that.
How do I turn the preview on and off?
Back under View, and under Color Profile, now Preview will have a checkbox next to it. You can just select this option repeatedly to turn CMYK view on or off
Wait, so how do I export in CMYK then?
A lot of the time, you don’t actually have to! A lot of digital printers these days have ink capabilities beyond just CMYK. There are toners for Light Cyan and Light Magenta available now, among others. Regular CMYK files don’t have the data to use toner colors like this. What this means is you probably don’t want to actually reduce your file to CMYK unless your printer wants you to as part of their workflow. Giving them an RGB file means that all available color information is there, and their print specialist and specialized RIP can handle the conversion to CMYK that will most benefit your file. It’s still very useful to preview your file in CMYK and make corrections though, because it’s still a close depiction of how your file will turn out!
I need to export in CMYK anyway.
Ok! Make sure you’ve picked your CMYK preview settings as this also determines the CMYK output settings. You’ll be using File, Export (Single Layer) to get your CMYK file.
I use .tif for this as it is a lossless format that works with the largest number of printers without issue. After you pick where to save this export, a new dialogue box will open:
First, make sure that Output range is set to To offset of crop mark
What this does is exports your image with the bleed included. Since you’re exporting for print, this is necessary. This is of course assuming you have set up your bleed properly as outlined in my Creating a New Illustration File guide!
Next, this is how you export with CMYK:
Select CMYK color under Expression color. Easy as that. Now, just a couple final steps to review for output:
Make sure it’s set to Scale ratio from original data and pick 100%. This will output the file at the exact size that you want it to print at, as set up when you created your new document. If you made the document an 8x10 print file, this option makes sure it exports as a full-size 8x10 file.
Finally, this is the last option:
This is default set to For illustration, and that’s what you’re looking for. It makes sure that your file flattens well so that colors or lines don’t shift where they were placed.
And you’re done! Now you’ve exported a print-ready CMYK file. This is one area that Photoshop is better at. It was literally designed for this sort of export work. But unless you’re working on a large-scale project with hundreds or thousands of prints, using an offset printer, using CSP is good enough for your common everyday digital print job.
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