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Hi community,
Really hoping someone can help me because I am going insane, and a project that should have taken me a couple of hours has taken over 10+, and I imagine my client is getting very frustrated.
I am working on a project for a client of mine, she is wanting to have some A6 flyers printed.
I made the documents in Adobe Illustrator, they are virtually the same apart from one main image.
When saving as PDF, one saves perfectly, the other is saving dark.
I'm not doing anything differently - why is one changing colour, when the palettes are the same and the saving process is exactly the same?
I have just been on a live chat and remove access with Adobe, and wasted 2 hours, I don't feel like the advisor understood the issue properly and I am now even more frustrated as I have repeated myself for so long.
Can someone PLEASE help me?
I've attached a comparsion so you can see.
Thanks in advance
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What color is that, spot, process?
Do both documents have the same Document Color Profile? You can check that in Edit > Assign Profile...
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AS @Ton Frederiks has indicated, this might aboout two different profiles assigned. Can you upload the two PDFs here? If you need to, you can DM one of us with the files if you do not want them out in the open.
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Hello Brad @ Roaring Mouse and @Ton Frederiks
Thank you both!
I'm fairly new to illustrator be honest, I've always gotten by using Photoshop and have never encountered issues before.
Unfortunately the PDFs sizes are too big to upload here, but I've uploaded them into a WeTransfer link > https://we.tl/t-mc1EG0Vdq0 if that works? I've labelled them 'correct' and 'wrong'.
I've tried to check the colour profiles (Document Color Profile? You can check that in Edit > Assign Profile...) but they both look the same.
Thank you in advance, really appreciate it
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Hard to tell. The files do not have an embedded profile and all the links are missing.
In the Wrong version, the lips are embedded, which means that the colors probably are converted to whatever profile you used for the Illustrator File.
In the Correct version they are linked, which means that the colors are not converted and are the colors from the image.
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Yes. I concur with @Ton Frederiks . You have an apples-and-oranges thing going on here. The images in the "wrong" file have been embedded, so they have all been converted to DeviceCMYK (Your document didn't have a profile assigned to it, so it used whatever your default CMYK settings are in your Color Settings). The images in the "right" file are linked and are, like the lips graphic PNG, are RGB, and carry through as such in your PDF, hence they will look different depending on what simulation profile you are using in Acrobat, or, worse, will be converted to CMYK by your printer's RIP depending on what CMYK conversion profile they use.
You need to get these back on the same page, so relink all your images in the "wrong" file and DO NOT EMBED THEM.
What are your CC Color settings?
What are your exact PDF export settings?
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In addition, it looks like your main colours (i.e. the background light dusty rose) and the darker one used (e.g bottom bar) at the bottom were at one point RGB/LABspot based colours converted to CMYK, but because there was likely a mismatch between Colour Management settings when that was done on each file, hence the CMYK values are ever so slightly different between the two documents.