SilverFast Ai Studio enables you to scan directly to CMYK through the Plug and Play CMYK setup. This involves setting the right colour profiles in the Preferences dialogue for colour management, and selecting P+P CMYK from the Scan button. But why would you want to scan directly to CMYK?

In colour management, you can have two types of workflow: an early binding and late binding workflow. In the early binding workflow you convert all colours into the final output space as soon as possible. In a late binding workflow, you delay the conversion as long as you possibly can.

An early binding workflow has the advantage that colour management becomes easy: you don’t have to think about colour conversions, the colours the operators and designers see on their monitors are accurate, and designers can’t make wrong colour space assumptions because everybody is working in the same colour space.

In prepress environments, CMYK scanning is often preferred, but it has disadvantages too, of course. The main disadvantage is that it is totally inflexible. It can only be used in a ‘closed’ environment where everybody indeed uses the same conventions in terms of colour and colour space. A freelance designer, for example, would have to comply to the CMYK workflow expressly.

If she were to lack the necessary equipment and knowledge, she would not be able to fit into the workflow easily.

Nevertheless, SilverFast makes early binding easy by supporting it with a profile-based one-click interface.

CIELAB Colour

SilverFast has yet another colour space that you can scan into: CIE LAB. This is the largest colour space we can work with, but it isn’t very intuitive. In a workflow where you want to postpone profile binding until someone tells you to use a specific one, though, it can be quite useful.

You can keep the scanned image in the LAB colour space until you are required to fit it into a smaller colour space. At that point, some of the colour information will be lost, but the difference between scanning in RGB or CMYK and losing colour information at the source or losing it later, is in some people’s opinion, negligible.