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H
hyatt pacificm10513176
Participant
January 31, 2020
Question

Colours off when printing from PDF

  • January 31, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 626 views

Hi there,

I've spent a lot of time and wasted a lot of trees printing! So I'm going a bit crazy!

I've created a colourful background in illustrator and saved as PDF to use in Indesign and add text over the top.

Then, I print direct from both illustrator and Indesign, the colours are vibrant and pop — but when I export/print the jpeg or PDF from both illustrator and Indesign, the colours are off and murky.

And I really don't understand how the PDF from illustrator looks/prints ok in Indesign, but soon as I print it through acrobat or preview for the jpegs— it's off? 
I have checked both Indesign and illustrator are in CMYK and tried all different settings when exporting and the colours. 

Any suggestion would be amazing! I've had to other designer friends go through it with me, and we're all at a loss!

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
January 31, 2020

We need much more information to be able to troubleshoot this including exactly what printers you are using, whether such printers are PostScript or some other PDL-based, etc. Post a sample InDesign or Illustrator file and the resultant PDF file and we can begin helping you.

 

               - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
H
hyatt pacificm10513176Author
Participant
January 31, 2020

Thanks for reaching out Dov,

I'm new to this and unsure what's needed from me to get the message across! I've been trying on digital postscript printers — I have actually no idea how I post a PDF/indd file here! Sorry! Here's just a screen grab!

 

Lukas Engqvist
Community Expert
Lukas EngqvistCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 31, 2020

Colour Management is colmplex, and you have severeal software included in your workflow. As Dov said there is too little information. Even an office CMYK printer may have a printer driver that expects/processes the  image as RGB and converts it to CMYK in the printer (unless you are using a RIP). Are the colours defined as spot colours, RGB or CMYK? Is ther JPEG you export to RGB or CMYK? The PDF file, is it a PDF/X and/or what settings do you export to PDF? From what program do you print your JPG and PDF? What are the colour settings in that application? 

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