The few people I know doing visual design still balk at a program that lacks native CMYK editing. Honestly I'm still skeptical about the significant improvements made for 3.0 due to the project's history.
I remember CMYK being the most common complaint (after the UI) 20 years ago, too. And at the time the entire GIMP project insisted that you never needed it and RGB was good enough. By coders for coders, indeed.
For what it's worth, a full CMYK mode is on my personal to-do list after the final 3.0 release (though 3.0 RC has had CMYK import/export and soft-proofing for a long while). I made a prototype implementation earlier (https://twitter.com/CmykStudent/status/1618261982628704259) and with all the color space improvements made since, it should be even easier to prototype now.
Out of curiosity, what improvements in 3.0 RC are you skeptical of? If you're willing to share, it'd be helpful feedback for us. :)
I don’t know. RGB was good enough. For every 1 person out there digitally processing art for a children’s book, which is the only piece of printed media I could think of whose lifecycle does not feature immediate disposal, there are 19 who would love their HDR iPhone photos to look right, so if anything, they should be worrying about P3.
This I feel is a fair complaint, I have seen it many times but I have to admit I am not a visual designer so I do not really understand it. Allow me to enumerate.
rgb is a larger color space than cmyk, that is to say the colors that cmyk can represent are a subset of rgb.
You are doing the work on an rgb monitor. what does having the illusion that you are working in cmyk get you? just use a cmyk color picker
but most damning, industrial printers are not CMYK, they are spot color, that is, they will be filled with essentially random primary colors chosen to best fit the final print. When you do need very fine control over the final color, you don't want a cmyk aware system you want a spot color aware system. And even then, you will only get close, requiring many test prints to validate the final result.
Irrespective of technical merit, if your printing shop requires a CMYK PDF, they requires a CMYK PDF.
You're not going to argue and discuss the merit of such and such color spaces with them; you're going to switch tools so that you get them to print your wedding invitations.
I remember CMYK being the most common complaint (after the UI) 20 years ago, too. And at the time the entire GIMP project insisted that you never needed it and RGB was good enough. By coders for coders, indeed.