Heya Luminaries,
From what I have been seeing is that Keyshot 2023 doesn’t seem to translate CMYK PSD files anymore. I believe I heard at Keyshot World that the color conversion would be better with the new version, but the software as default doesn’t have them appear at all. I was wondering if maybe there was a setting I was missing to get my CMYK Labels to appear again or this is a feature not yet implemented?
First of all, I can confirm, that when I tried dragging and dropping a CMYK PSD onto a surface in KeyShot, it didn’t load and I got the following error:
Becasue you did mention ‘color conversion’, I figured I’d chime in here.
Luxion did implement a few things in 2023 to help ensure KeyShot displayed textures/labels correctly:
What KeyShot won’t do is convert a CMYK texture to RGB texture or make textuers with mixed color profiles appear identical in KeyShot.
Not sure if any of the above is news or helpful in any way.
I’m not a digital color wizard by any stretch, but am working on understanding all of this myself, so it helps me to summarize it as such here. If I’m incorrect in any of these statements, please correct me!
Personally I always convert all my CMYK things to RGB without any profile before I drop them in KeyShot. In the end KeyShot renders using RGB values as it’s about light so I’d like to control the conversion myself. And the reason I don’t want to use profiles is because it’s easy to get unwanted results because it’s so easy to have different profiles attached to different images.
I actually never tried to use CMYK files but I know for example that if I copy a Illustrator CMYK object in a Photoshop RGB file it has different colors than when I change the illustrator document type to RGB first and afterwards the colors within Illustrator and c/p it to Photoshop. The last one is the preferred workflow for me.
While CMYK > RGB most of the time is easier than the other way around the differences in translation are too big for me between different software packages. Must say that for me profiles were more important when I did print work, things for screen are quite a different story since every TV/monitor/phone is different anyway. Anyway, I try to keep all things used RGB for simplicity and control 
@will.gibbons Thanks a bunch for the clarification. I was under the impression that the CMYK files would translate better than how it was in Keyshot 11, but it seems like it just doesn’t support it at all anymore.
@oscar.rottink A lot of the times the art used on our products are CMYK as we often provide embedded art in our AI spec sheets to the factory to use directly for mass production. The thing that I am confused about is that CMYK files, while not perfectly matching in say AI or PSD, generally had a close enough representation in the renders to work acceptably, especially for simple colored vector art - but the latest version of Keyshot 2023 doesn’t even load the CMYK files at all. Generally features are added with each new version, but it seems this one got taken away.
Hello Everyone,
Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention!
I can confirm that this is a bug in KeyShot 2023.
@oliver.yu Yeah it’s odd if features just get removed. But I just did a quick test in the latest beta build and while CMYK PSD gave some errors both .tif and .psd CMYK files render fine in preview. Both as label and as normal texture.
The error with .PSD cmyk file:
I wouldn’t advice using the latest 2023.2 beta in a production environment since it’s a real early beta but if you want to use it to render some earlier scenes with CMYK files, it doesn’t overwrite the existing KS installation.
@oscar.rottink For sure, for the files that have CMYK PSD Textures, I am still using KS11. As for KS2023, I am still one 2023.1. Hopefully the get the bugs out cause I like a lot of the features like Raymask node and I feel the way lighting works in KS2023 is much more accurate.
