Using a CMYK PSD without Photoshop

Question

I have run into a common, yet difficult problem. I do not use Photoshop for image manipulation. Since all my work is web-based, GIMP does what I need in 99% of the situations. The problem is that I occasionally receive PSD files with CMYK encoding rather than RGB encoding. These files will not open in GIMP, nor will they convert in ImageMagick.

Has anyone found a good solution for converting CMYK files to RGB files (either PSD format or a flat format like PNG) that does not involve the use of Photoshop? Say a plug-in for GIMP or a standalone utility?

Answer 1

Assuming you have access to a Windows computer, freewares like IrfanView or XnView can open it and resave in whatever format you need too. XnView knows more formats, and has a NConvert command line version for this task, but IrfanView can do command line operations as well - I usually install both, preferring IrfanView's interface.

Answer 2

Open Office can actually import CMYK PSD files. Just right click on a PSD file and choose "Open With Other Application" and choose OpenOffice.org Drawing. (Assuming you are using GNOME.)

It doesn't support layers though, so you can't do anything really fancy.

Answer 3

Also you can import it to Scribus, if use 1.3.5 or higher in Scribus you can change the layer visibility and blend mode, the image can be saved in tif, jpg, png, pdf, ps/eps; after, any of this can be edited with Gimp.

Answer 4

Seems like a plugin exists here http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate-plus/index.html which includes:

separate RGB to CMYK conversion / Softproofing plug-in (improved version of Alastair M. Robinson's "Separate" plug-in