Before you submit your carefully crafted artwork for the label for the CD printing or DVD printing you are about to have duplicated, or the design for the CD inlay, backing card or booklet – here are a few tips to consider.

If you have included images that are in the RGB format they may look very different when printed on your CD label than they do on your computer screen. Maybe you RGB picture is showing green grass and a blue sky on a summer’s day, you wont be happy if the finished CD’s or DVD’s come back looking more like a brownish autumn day completely destroying the summers day image you had so painstakingly created.

This can happen if you do not format your file correctly before submitting it for printing to your chosen CD duplication company. When the printer prepares the artwork file for printing their pre-press computers will RIP the file, converting it into a language that the printers can understand. As part of this process your RGB colours are converted into CMYK colours.

Computer monitors use RBG colours making up the image on the screen by mixing red green and blue light, black being created by the absence of light. In printing the colours are made by mixing inks of different colours, CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, white being created by the absence of colour on the white paper.

Unless you embed a colour profile in your artwork the printer does not know how to make this conversion and has to use an average colour setting, the result can be very different than expected.

The answer is for you to convert the images yourself before you insert them into your CD or DVD artwork. This can be done easily in a program such as Adobe Photoshop. If the result once converted is not to your liking you can adjust the colours before using the image.

It is for this reason that many CD duplication companies will not accept artwork with RGB images. They want you to be happy with the result after it is printed and prefer to point out the potential problem before duplicating your CD’s or DVD’s.