[Scribus] Converting graphics to CMYK with free software tools

[Axel Bojer]

I just tried to find several free software graphic programs that are 
able to save images as cmyk, because Gimp only can /fake/ this at the 
moment. But it seems I can't get it to work properly.

This is the possible tools I found on my research:
==================================================
* Krita -- Part of koffice: http://www.koffice.org/tours/1.5
* Imagemagick (using the command
convert RGB.tiff -profile RGB.icc -profile CMYK.icc CMYK.tiff)
* jpegicc and tifficc
All the last three are mentioned in a former thread on this list :-)
http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-August/012738.html
* Cinepaint (a gimp clone) -- http://www.cinepaint.org/docs/cmyk.html

This web page sums up the mentioned and also proprietary alternatives
for Linux:
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2006/09/13/hdr-and-cmyk-editing-in-linux/

Results:
--------
* Imagemagick: seems alright to me in Konqueror -- My image was slightly 
darker on the screen, which is normal. But when I imported it to Scribus 
it seems totally different, almost black and white (and greeenish).
* jpegicc: seems totally weird in konqueror, like an inverted image. In 
Scribus much darker, but still uselessly different and still with 
totally different colours.
* tifficc: In konqueror just slightly lighten up compared to the 
imagemagick version, but seems totally ok for use there. In Scribus it 
seems much darker, but as this is the case for CMYK compared to RGB it 
may be just OK, so I tried to make a pdf out of it (with all those three 
images in it) -- without colour profiles enabled, though.

On all these three I used the profiles: AdobeRGB1998.icc and 
EuroscaleCoated.icc.
My images was created with Gimp, I dont know wich rgb-modell it used for 
it, so this might be (part of) the problem ... (Krita tells me it is 
"sRGB built-in (lcms internal)", so I tried to convert the image to 
"Adobe rgb" before I ran it through tifficc and the result seems pretty 
the same as the first run with tifficc described above, just that 
Scribus did not know the resolution of the Image and guessed 72 dpi. 
When I, still in Scribus, changed it to 300 dpi it has the right size, 
so I suggest this is just a lack of megainformation in the image.

* Krita: I used "CMYK 8 bit integer channel" and "perceptual", but when 
I try to open the same file with Krita again it gives me a "could not 
open (...) Reason: parsing error". I think they really are broken 
because they don't show up in Konqueror and not in Scribus.

* Cinepaint: I was not able to install it on my computer due to 
dependency problems (using Kubuntu dapper amd64).


BTW: I tried to open the Gimp-file (.xcf) in krita, but the result was
really bad, so I had to convert it first.

Does someone have other experiences with this?

Best regards
Axel Bojer