I’ve got an interesting question for the peanut gallery. At work, we’ve gone through a few changes in the last few years. We’ve changed ink providers twice, changed color systems, and changed proofers.

One of the bizarre things that we have to do now and then is reprint an old file (reprinting is routine, old files are routine, hear me out) – the bizarre part is trying to get the color to match from the previous printing to the current system.

Usually, this isn’t that bad. We can just run a Photoshop action on the Links folder that assigns our old ICC profile, and then converts to our new one. That’s if they’re in CMYK. The weird part happens when the images are in RGB. See, our old action lists would assign Adobe98, and then convert to our proofer profile (not a press profile). Weird. So currently, if there are RGB images, we have an action that… *takes a breath* assigns Adobe98, converts to our old proofer ICC, assigns our old press ICC, then converts to our new press ICC.

Does anyone know of a better way, mathematically, to do this? Can I generate an ICC profile (either RGB or CMYK) that would make this a one step process?