here is the message sent to some of the companies doing printing,
in which the problem is explained:


I do a great many posters, magazine covers, etc., the kind of pictures
you might find in annual reports, with strongly saturated unrealistic
colors like "flourescent blue", acid yellow, etc..

Often I am getting posters printed.  They contains pictures that I have not
been happy with in terms of the way they were convereted to CMYK.

Suppose that I wanted to have your company convert the pictures to CMYK,
would you be able to do this, and if so, what would it cost?

Images are typically 4000 by 6000 pixels.

Poster sizes are typically 16 by 22 inches or whatever size is
economical to print based on the sizes of the presses available.

Quantities are tyipcally in the lower end of the scale (e.g. 1000 copies).

The pictures often of a building, in which I use coloured lights
with deliberately overexposed color (e.g. deep blue light I
deliberately overexposed several f-stops to create a very strong
saturated blue).

I don't care too much about color fidelity, e.g. I don't care if the
blues shift to cyan, or some such, but I do want the final image to
be very saturated, e.g. I don't want to see greying of the highlights.

I know that the gamut of CMYK is different than RGB, and realize that
CMYK can't produce a "flourescent blue", but I would like to see my
colors distorted into different but equally vibrant colors in CMYK
rather than seeing my colors muted down with grey.

If this could be done well, and done cost-effectively, we would very
much like to consider the possibility of shifting most of our business,
and the business of our colleagues to your company, since myself and
my colleagues have been very unhappy with a great deal of work done
by most of the print houses in our area.  My colleagues include a
number of photographic studios unhappy with the status quo in terms
of print quality we're experiencing.  We've been very unhappy with
Photoshop, so we've switched to mainframe computers running Linux
with the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), but the print houses
we deal with continue to inflict Photoshop upon us, together with
Photoshops abysmal RGB to CMYK conversion.

You can take a look at examples of the kinds of images I do:
http://wearcam.org/convocationhall.html

Please let me know if you think you could convert these kinds of
images to CMYK while maintaining the "punch and kick", and if so what
it would cost.

Perhaps you have an entire print house that could do the whole job as well.