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I used to use the poly pen with snap to surface and clone onto that which gives you the ability to just paint clones wherever you like, tho I think theres a specific trick for that in newer C4d versions.
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I think you could also use a rail, just make a copy of the original spline and move it up, drop it in the rail option of the cloner. At least it works in ye olde R18.
had to reverse the transform angle in the cloner.
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cloner_spline_orientation-RAIL.c4d

As I understand it C4D defaults to SRGB when it renders and pshop tends to default to Adobe RGB 1998, so there may be a discrepancy there just between the RGB profiles. It depends how you have your profile handling set up in pshop, ie if your pshop default is SRGB you should be fine, but the other options are to ignore the profile or to convert it to the working space, so both of these would probably change the color.
As for CMYK, thats a different ballgame and you just have to get used to the fact that some colour ranges just won't convert well to CMY and you have to make a compromise due to the limited nature of ink on paper Vs RGB on supersaturated screens.
Having said that some printing processes use more than 4 colours nowadays in which case I would give my printer the RGB and let them make the conversion.
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Rendering in 16bit may help with the CMY conversion, but really depends on subject.

Your file was a bit heavy for my machine so I have had to take out a few things and also turn the petals off and the shell down to 2 clones. I also dont have field fall off in R18 so Im using a linear falloff here.
Ive copied in your original flower and put that in the cloner, I think maybe where you were going wrong is having the cloner set to "play" in the transform tab Im not great with mograph but I think when you set that to fixed you enable the plain effector to then start the animation, also in the plain effector you need to put a frame offset thats equal to or greater than the length of your original animation.
Also I deleted the turbulence from the flower as I dont think its best practice to clone that.
Stripped down file below, had to delete textures and other stuff to make it fit here.
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Frame set_06 falloff.c4d

projecting a mesh is different from projecting a spline, this may help with the spline.
 
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This is a bit of a complex file for me, but to make it work on my machine in R18, and by working I mean the balloons move up when the controller does, for that to happen I had to lower the thresholds in the deactivation tab of the dynamics, doesn't seem to need to be zero but it also seems different weather or not you play it in from frame zero. It seems when coming in from zero it has time to deactivate but when playing in from say 1250 balloons are still moving so the dynamics are still activated.
I think thats what's happening tho Im no expert on the inner workings of C4D dynamics.
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Try turning both linear and angular damping to zero if in doubt, should play from zero then, at least it does on mine.
Dolly Balloons 02.c4d

This is a problem that pops up quite a lot when your clones are packed close together like that. The key to fixing it is using the movement from another cloner and transferring that to your rings with the inheritance effector.
So with the second hidden cloner you lay them out so its easy to use effectors. Normally you can just use the inheritance effector as you often want to move the clones to a new position but in this case you only want the y position, inheritance cant do that but the re effector can, so add the inheritance to the re effector list and in the re effector parameters you can turn off X and Z living only the y.
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edit, there's probably a better slicker way to do it with R25 and nodes etc.

C4D_Issue_Forum_0001.c4d

This turns out to be an insurmountable problem, the Houdini site only has versions going back to 16, they said contact MAXON and after connecting with support they tell me its no longer possible, so its case closed on this one.
 
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