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Question

Colour shift when exporting from InDesign CC 2021

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 21, 2021
4 replies
2154 views

Hi everyone, first post from me...

I held off upgrading to Indesign CC 2021 as there were older Macs in our advertising studio and having to deal with lockdown so we sat on CC 2020 for a while, I upgraded this week and discovered a problem when creating hi res pdfs which has been a trouble free part of my workflow for years - basically I have raster illustrations in CMYK, instead of having metres of the same background colour in the image I crop them tightly and have a swatch with identical ink values in Indesign.

This has worked fine up until the upgrade - I would output ads for newspapers on PDF X1a 2001 and there would be no visible picture box, now I get a box around the image with a clear colour shift (see attached). This also affects regular client pdfs that aren't hi res.

I thought it might just be a pdf export issue, but I tried exporting a CMYK jpg and it experiences the same shift, it's like a variant on transparency's white hairlines but worse. Exporting as an RGB jpg made no difference either. I have tried this on 3 different Macs with the same result.

I also tried reinstalling CC 2020 on one Mac, but the settings that previously worked appear to have been overwritten.

My immediate workaround to get the ads out the door was to use a clipping path, but theoretically I shouldn't have to do this when everything worked perfectly fine prior to the update.

Apologies for the long post, any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated!

This topic has been closed for replies.

rob day

Community Expert

Hi @WiltonRoots , I can see the problem in the PDF you included—there’s no transparency on the InDesign page, so the problem isn’t flattener stitching. It seems to be limited to a line of 3% pixels on the magenta and black plates, which are not in the Photoshop file and don’t show in InDesign’s Separation Preview panel:

I did notice that the InDesign document has no CMYK profile assignment, and the placed art shows as Document CMYK (no profile) in the Links panel. So when you exported the PDF/X-1a the document CMYK profile fell back to your Color Settings’ Working CMYK space—Modified FTnews_101007p... and it was set as the PDF/X Output Intent profile.

Could you share the newsprint profile you are using as your Working CMYK space?

If I set my Working CMYK space to US Newsprint (SNAP), or any other recommended profile, and export your provided .indd file to default PDF/X-1a I don’t see the problem. Using CC2020:

W

WiltonRootsAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi Rob, thanks for looking into this.

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/6b3620be-efbc-4e2d-5d0c-1ff5034cf7d2 here's the profile which is provided by the Financial Times - I don't believe the profile is the issue - even when everything is assigned to ISO Newspaper 26v4 which is a standard for most UK newspapers, I get the same result. As I said earlier, CC 2020 was working fine and dandy, no boxes, no lines, just nice flat colour. I think my lesson is if it's not broken don't try and update it.

rob day

Community Expert

Sorry I was checking in CC2020, it does look like a possible bug with CC2021. My first thought was that it might be from the big1863 to 300ppi downsample in the Compression setting. In CC2021 I turned off Down Sampling and didn’t get the line:

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

When you created the colour in Photoshop, you need to remember that it's being created in an 8-bit colour space. PS displays the values to the nearest full integer in %, but may actually be 29.6% in reality when it becomes a value out of 256 levels), whereas the colour in InDesign isn't rendered until it gets to the RIP and it's number will be exact. This can cause a slight difference in values.

My first suggestion is to delete the background in your image and leave it transparent as a .PSD file.

OR

Crop a 1" x 1" patch of the background colour you created in Photoshop, and PLACE that as your background colour instead of defining the colour in ID - scale it up to fit the page (since it's a uniform colour, the resolution is irrelevant). This way you are dealing with apples-to-apples values.

Also: check your PDF export settings for colour conversion. You will need to Preserve Numbers to prevent your cmyk values from being converted to a different space. This could be exaggerating the issue I mentioned above, as your image has a FOGRA profile assigned to it, but your ID document is assigned your FTNews... profile.

W

WiltonRootsAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for your feedback Brad, appreciate it.

I tried the psd method and the patch of colour method and neither made any difference - much the same with saving the image with the FT profile - these are images I have used and sent off with zero problems in the past, these issues have only surfaced since I switched to CC 2021.

It is indeed a puzzle...

rob day

Community Expert

If it is happening in AcrobatPro can you share a sample InDesign page with the placed file via your CC acount or Dropbox?

W

WiltonRootsAuthor

Participating Frequently

No problem, I will sort this out when I get a free moment.

W

WiltonRootsAuthor

Participating Frequently

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/b3a509c1-a023-4edb-53bb-40023c13146b

rob day

Community Expert

Are you viewing the PDF/X-1a in AcrobatPro with Output Preview turned on?

W

WiltonRootsAuthor

Participating Frequently

Yes indeed, it shows clearly the issues I'm having. It's certainly odd how something that wasn't broken is now broken...plus it shows up in the channels in Photoshop.

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