Your welcome Neilmoore
I wanted to let you know some additional information that may help you in your decision making on how to proceed. All CMYK commercial color printing of which I am aware has a color gamut that is smaller than the standard sRGB color gamut (typical RGB editing color space). That means assuming you are using a calibrated display, what you see on your screen is not necessarily what the colors will be when printed. The more saturated colors will be mapped to the best CMYK colors (typically of lower saturation).
So being able to see the final colors through either what is called soft proofing or just convering to CMYK and viewing has its advantages.
It is also a bit more complicated. When converting between color modes, it turns out you need to know the color space of the printer (or if the printer does not want it in a color space) you need to know which color space with which to soft proof to see how the final color will appear and make adjustments if needed if you don't like the result.
There are also some additional options when making the conversion that have to do with using black point conversion and also the rendering intent (algorithm used).
This is not to scare you, it is to make you aware that what you see on your screen is probably not how it is going to be printed. Knowing how to preview the final color and how to compensate is just so you know and get the colors that you desire and which can be printed on that final output device.
As an example, I have provided an image below to demonstrate how converting from RGB to CMYK can shift colors.
The upper part of the image are both RGB in sRGB color space. It is a full spectrum rainbow of maximum saturation that is brought down in a gradient to pure black on the left side and brought to full white on the right side.
The lower half of the image is exactly the same in mirror form yet converted to the CMYK color space of "US Web Coated (SWOP) V2" I turned off black point compensation for the conversion.
You can see that the colors are much more muted. So if you used highly saturated colors in RGB, they will look not so saturated when printed.
So the mechanics of conversion can be done by a lot of different software from Photoshop to online converters pretty easily, yet having the ability to see in advance the colors that will pirnt is priceless and helps not having more turnarounds with guessing on what to do to get what you want.
It may sound daunting yet all of this color management can be leared over time. If you are good with have some mismatch between what you see on your screen and what is printed, this may not be of great import. Just trying to help you see what can happen in advance.
Best wishes in your endeavors.
John Wheeler
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