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daisymari
Participating Frequently
May 17, 2018
Question

Help! Saved PDF as RGB?

  • May 17, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 10262 views

Hi everyone! I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction so that I can stop making this mistake. I've been working with Illustrator for a few months now and have been slowly getting to know the program. I had designed some business cards a few months back and sent them off to the printer with no issues. Recently I made new business cards, and I THOUGHT I had done everything exactly as I had done the first time. However, when I received the business cards in the mail, I saw that the final printed colors were cooler in tone when compared to my Illustrator document and previous business cards. Also, there had been some kind of color registration issue with the cards. The resulting business cards were dizzying to look at.

I called the printer, hoping they could point out if I had done something wrong unknowingly, because I had thought I'd followed their instructions. Someone checked the PDF I uploaded to their site and then informed me I had saved the PDF as RGB, not CMYK. I would've bet my life on the fact that I had saved it as CMYK, and I'm honestly at a loss. I don't know where I made this mistake.

It's been a couple of weeks since I designed the business cards now, but I edited them as .ai files. As far as I knew, the color space was CMYK. When I finished the cards, I converted all the text to outlines and saved as a PDF to upload to the printer's website.

So I guess I have a lot of questions! How do I double-check that I am working in CMYK and not RGB? Do any of you have a guess where I may have saved the document as RGB? I did attempt to check my document's profile in Photoshop, like the helpful person from the printing company did, but my Photoshop predates my use of Adobe CC products, so it doesn't even have CMYK as a profile option -- everything opened in my Photoshop automatically is converted to RGB. So double-checking it in that way wasn't helpful.

I appreciate anyone's insight. At the time of creating these cards, I was using Adobe CC 2017 Illustrator (am now using the 2018 version).

Many thanks,

Mari !

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

Danny Whitehead.
Danny Whitehead.
Legend
May 18, 2018

Do you still have the PDFs you sent (both the ones you've had the issues with and the earlier ones that came back OK)? If you open those with Adobe Acrobat and open the Output Preview, you can hover over the colours to see if the CMYK values match.

The misregistration, requirement of outlined type, and checking trying to check the colour space of a PDF using Photoshop, all set the printer incompetence alarm bells ringing.

    D
    daisymariAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    May 18, 2018

    I just downloaded Acrobat and checked my files, and it looks like my PDFs were actually all CMYK. The values all matched when compared with each other, although it certainly showed some areas where my design should be cleaned up and more consistent. Thank you for that suggestion. It was very helpful.

    Thinking that the printer customer care folks misdiagnosed the issue is almost as distressing as thinking I somehow saved the file wrong. At least I can learn from my mistakes and prevent it from happening again. I'm not sure there's anything I can do about their misdiagnosis except maybe contact them and call them on it.

    JonathanArias
    JonathanArias
    Legend
    May 17, 2018

    Hi,

    I personally think you should be working in adobe indesign for layout. with indesign you export to print .pdf (CYMYK) or interactive (rbg). Simple.

      Monika Gause
      Community Expert
      Monika GauseCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 17, 2018

        schrieb

      Hi,

      I personally think you should be working in adobe indesign for layout. with indesign you export to print .pdf (CYMYK) or interactive (rbg). Simple.

      You can still completely mess up your colors if you don't understand color profiles and what a CMYK-to-CMYK-conversion might do to your colors.

        D
        daisymariAuthor
        Participating Frequently
        May 18, 2018

        I have a total newb question. What do you mean by CYMK-to-CMYK conversion?

        Monika Gause
        Community Expert
        Monika GauseCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        May 17, 2018

        To check a PDF use Acrobat. Photoshop has no business in checking PDFs. Did they really do that? Doesn't sound too professional.

        So whatever they found out about your PDF might or might not be correct.

         

        When your file is in CMYK color mode, you see that in the document title next to the file name.

        What might have happened is some issue with color profiles. Or something else - we can't really know.

         

        You might really want to learn about print production and about color management.

         

        For color management there is information spread all over the Adobe Help files. It's slightly messy. This is just one of the pages: Understanding color management, Adobe Acrobat

         

        You might want to consider viewing a LinkedIn Learning course, which is a paid ressource: Learning Color Management

          D
          daisymariAuthor
          Participating Frequently
          May 18, 2018

          That's a good suggestion, using Acrobat. I just downloaded it and will be using it to check my files from now on. It seems like it is an excellent tool! Acrobat shows that my files are indeed are CMYK, and so did Illustrator when I opened them up and glanced at the document title.

          Thank you for those links! I will be reading through that e-book and those help pages — sounds like I have a lot to learn. That LinkedIn Learning course also sounds like it would be a good investment, so that I'm operating with more knowledge and not simply relying on the printer's website and customer care folks to guide me in the right direction.

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