RGB to CMYK for your photo fanzine or photo book — colours that print true.
Screens glow in RGB; printers think in CMYK. Aldo Reborn converts your photos with a real FOGRA39 profile and shows you a soft-proof — so what you see is what prints.
Why prints come out dull and muddy
Your photos live in RGB — millions of glowing colours. Printers only speak CMYK, a smaller set of inks. Hand a printer raw RGB and it guesses the conversion: blacks go muddy, electric blues flatten, a sunset turns to a sad casserole. Aldo Reborn does the translation properly, with the profile your printer expects.
How it works
Under the hood
Real colour management, not a guess — the same approach pro print shops rely on, automated.
- Colour engine
- macOS ColorSync — perceptual + black-point compensation
- Profile
- Coated FOGRA39 (ISO 12647-2), embedded in the PDF
- PDF standard
- PDF/X-3 with a CMYK output intent
- Soft-proof
- On-screen preview of the printed colour
- Source photos
- JPEG, PNG, HEIC, RAW, TIFF, WebP, AVIF…
- Page numbers
- Black-only (K) — a single, crisp plate
Raw RGB vs by hand vs Aldo Reborn
Export RGB
- Conversion
- Printer guesses
- Soft-proof
- No
- Profile
- None
- Blacks
- Often muddy
- Setup
- —
Convert by hand
- Conversion
- Manual in Photoshop
- Soft-proof
- Maybe
- Profile
- Manual
- Blacks
- Depends
- Setup
- Fiddly
Aldo Reborn
Done for you
- Conversion
- Automatic (FOGRA39)
- Soft-proof
- Built-in
- Profile
- Embedded
- Blacks
- K-only, crisp
- Setup
- Zero
Frequently asked questions
What is CMYK and why does it matter for printing? +
Screens mix red, green and blue light (RGB); printers mix cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks (CMYK). CMYK can’t reproduce every screen colour, so photos must be converted carefully or they print dull. Aldo Reborn does that conversion with the profile printers expect.
Will my colours change when I convert to CMYK? +
Some very saturated screen colours (electric blues, neon greens) sit outside what ink can reproduce, so they shift slightly. Aldo uses a perceptual conversion that keeps photos looking natural, and the soft-proof shows you exactly what to expect.
Which colour profile does Aldo Reborn use? +
Coated FOGRA39 (ISO 12647-2), the most common standard for European printers, embedded directly in the exported PDF as an output intent.
Do I have to convert my photos to CMYK myself? +
No. Drop in RGB photos and Aldo handles the conversion on export — no Photoshop round-trip needed.
What is a soft proof? +
A soft proof simulates on your screen how the colours will look once printed in CMYK, so you can catch dull or shifted colours before you print.
Print colours you can trust
Aldo Reborn is in private beta on macOS — CMYK conversion handled, automatically.