New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
I've never had anyone ask for vector art in a .psd format before. SVG's closed equivalent is more like .ai, not .psd. A .psd file is meant for raster (bitmap) images (from Photoshop, specifically). It's odd that a client would expect a .psd with editable vectors. Possibly going out to .eps or .ai would have been a better choice.
RGB -> CMYK conversion can be done with a variety of tools, including Image Magick. I would only use Separate+ if I was doing the printing myself (which I never do).
All that aside, the client ultimately does, to a degree, dictate the end product. Personally it's never been an issue for me (although I do work a lot with clients who are using open source and Linux), but it's ALWAYS vital to communicate early and often. Ask the client about their pipeline; find out what formats they need and WHY. Unfortunately, a lot of clients are actually very stupid (I mean that in the nicest possible way), so they may insist that they need a PSD even though their graphics "expert" is actually just going to open the thing in Photoshop and do an immediate export to an uncompressed TIFF or TARGA. If you offer to save them a step, they may end up happier; they just didn't think to ask for it.
The important thing is to help the client. If you find out what they need, usually open source products can be used to produce it. Worse case, in my experience, is some stupid 5 minute trip into some closed source app just to make sure the deliverable still looks and acts like I think it should. Save, send, done.
What kind of mock-up? Are you talking about architectural renderings?