Profile conversion within Illustrator?

[Colorblind]

I know you can assign profiles in Illustrator but I was wondering if there is a way to do a profile conversion in Illustrator (such as in Photoshop) once the file is opened. One workaround would be to save as PDF and do the profile conversion in the "Output" pane. So is there a "Convert to profile" command in Illustrator? I'm using CS4. Thanks.

[kyle]

Assuming you want to convert CMYK to CMYK, you could make sure the source profile is assigned, change your default CMYK to the destination profile, then cycle the document color mode (File > Document Color Mode) to RGB and back to CMYK. This would be slightly less accurate and probably introduce a small amount of extra quantization than a "direct" conversion, as it will use your default RGB profile as an intermediary. The round-trip performance and gamut of your default RGB profile will affect the accuracy. You would likely get the best result using ProPhoto RGB.

If you want to convert CMYK to RGB or RGB to CMYK, then just simply change the document color mode. If you want RGB to RGB, then you'll probably suffer some noticeable gamut reduction if you use any standard CMYK profile as your default.

I've barely looked at CS4 - there may be an alternative way.

[Thierry]

I don't think that it's possible when the document is open but you can do it at opening. If the profile embeded in the document is not the same than Illustrator's working color space, Adobe's application will ask you if you want to convert the colors or leave them unchanged provided that the check boxes dedicated to policies for non-matching profiles (in the window Edition>Colors) are checked.

The conversion will happen just like in Photoshop, using Lab as connexion space but the results are not always what we want them to be: colors that could be achieved with three primaries are often saperated with 4…

Sorry if this explanation is not very clear but I don't have an english version of Illustrator…