[Gimp-user] 4 color book covers

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke John Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com>
> Now, I want to make a book cover, four color. I know that cmyk is handled only
> marginally in Gimp. I don't have and don't particularly want to have
> Adobe Distiller (the Unix price is ridiculous.) So what is the best strategy
> for me to follow, assuming that my printer will need to pick up the prepress
> preparation burden at some point? Should I attempt to prepare separations ?
> Should I convert my Gimp-made cover to pdf via Ghostscript?

Let your printer do the hardwork.  You do the easy stuff - art design.
Save in uncompressed TIFF and take to your printer.  They can load it into
Photoshop and do the color separation for you.  This is what I've done for
various magazines, books, CD covers and brochures.

> And has anyone actually done a book cover in four colors using Gimp?

Yes.  I did the cover of my first book using the GIMP, version 1.0 actually.  
The issue you'll have to deal with is how out-of-gamut the color might end
up.  In my cases, I wasn't too concerned if the colors were a little off,
so long as they weren't waaaaay off.  I had little trouble in these cases.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel@graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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