CorelDRAW and on-demand printing

Some of my more recent endeavours have been setting up artwork for use with on-demand printing websites like Threadless and TeePublic.

These and other websites are set-up on the premise that you, as the artist, supply your drawings to your "store", and the on-demand site will take care of the invoicing, printing, shipping, and customer service aspects.  You decide how much you wish to charge for the item and the on-demand service takes their cut.  This can be a pretty low barrier for entry, especially for those of us that really don't want to worry about the logistics beyond creating the design!

There are some tricky bits though, and one of them is that you submit artwork in the RGB colour space, but the on-demand printer eventually outputs it as CMYK.  So if you've dipped your toes into the colour space waters, you know that going from RGB to CMYK pushes you into a smaller colour space with less dynamic colours.

The how-to's on these sites will give you "helpful" information such as "design in CMYK, covert to RGB, punch up the colours a bit to compensate for the colour shift, and then hopefully it will come out the other end like you expected!"  This doesn't really jive with how I want to design, all feeling a bit uncontrolled.

But this is where the tools built into Coreldraw can definitely help you out.  I will set-up a new document using the RGB colour space, but then set all my proofing colours to simulate CMYK output.  This helps give you a much more true view of the colour conversion without guessing how the colour "punch up" will actually turn out.