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Vibrant_fierceness5D2C
Participant
September 25, 2017
Answered

Color change pdf file

  • September 25, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1080 views

I have a pdf file which is supposed to print in a medium to dark color. It is currently almost black. How do I change the objects and type from this CMYK mixture to either a PMS spot color, such as 731, or a mixture of CMYK similar to this?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Dov Isaacs

Acrobat Preflight is indeed the tool you would need to use to map one or more colors to other colors. But due to the complexity of what you want/need to do, you would need to create a custom fixup based on color mapping/conversion. This is not a trivial task and there are no “step by step instructions” available for the process, the results of which might be all that visually satisfying anyway. The complexity is such that you may be best off editing the source document from which the PDF file was made and creating a new PDF file from that.

          - Dov

2 replies

Luke Jennings
Luke Jennings
Inspiring
September 26, 2017

If you have access to the original file and software that produced the PDF, you could make the changes there and make a new PDF.

If you have PitStop, you could change the color of the vector objects to a specific 4C build or spot color and then edit the image(s) in Photoshop to match the desired color.

You could save the PDF as a BW grayscale tiff in Photoshop, then place it into InDesign (or Illustrator) and apply a swatch color to the image, then export to a new PDF (it's not ideal to convert the vector to raster, but if you select a high enough resolution, it should print acceptably).

Kanikas
Kanikas
Legend
September 25, 2017

Moving to Editing & Exporting PDFs​

V
Vibrant_fierceness5D2CAuthor
Participant
September 25, 2017

I looked up many of the articles on exporting and editing. Can you give me a specific file which gives step by step instructions? Tried a preflight, using the wrench to change cmyk to spot, but it didn't work.

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
September 26, 2017

That was not a reply about your problem. It was letting you know that the message was moved to a more suitable forum, where more people might see it. I don't have a suggestion, what you want to do sounds hard or impossible.

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