Am I at fault?
Please judge am I right or wrong.
As I've said somewhere before, my Indesign experience is limited to text and rarely some grayscale images.
But now I'm working on a more complex book (for print) with some color images, many grayscale ones, live transparencies, diagrams etc.
To make everything right, I found a designer who would be a 'proxy' between me and the printshop and who would give me few advices, so I can get an optimal result. I didn't expect someone else "to do my homework", but I did expect some advices.
He never warned me about the problems of overprinting, which I learned about only recently. One must check the whole book in overprint view in Indesign, otherwise some elements might dissapear in print! My previous works were simple, so there was no need for that.
Also, he never warned me that the printshops avoid live transparencies and that I must flatten them.
When I asked him which CMYK standard this printshop uses, he said something like: "None" or "It's irrelevant". But I thought, wait a minute, one has to pick a standard (US SWOP, FOGRA...). I was thinking, thinking, asking on forums, but I found no solution.
I thought that I must convert the images to some kind of "pure, essential CMYK", which probably doesn't exist. Later, I took some courage and asked him again, he says convert every image to CMYK in Photoshop.
But then, Photoshop also uses those standards. Which one to pick? The guy says: "the default one". But the default one on your computer might be different to the default one on my computer (e.g. you have US SWOP, I have FOGRA). You can even change the default one to your liking.
Also, I logically assume that if you pick a CMYK profile for your images in Photoshop, your Indesign document must be assigned the same profile and you should export in PDF to the same profile. Am I correct? What would be the consequence if I convert an image to US SWOP and if I place it in FOGRA workspace and then I export it to some Japanese standard?
But after all, I wanted an RGB workflow, why this mess?
And then again I spent whole nights on forums, reading, asking questions, people tried to help me, but in the end of the day (of the night) you should call the printshop!
Finally, after almost two months of agony, I called the printshop directly. The guy whom I spoke to helped me more in 5 minutes than this designer in two months.
The printshop guy explained me some things, he warned me about the dangers and he sent me a joboptions file with all the necesary settings. This was a great relief.
Only later I learned that this is a normal procedure for every decent printshop. It is normal for a printshop to help it's clients by offering them such files and by publishing instructions on their websites (like: flatten the transparencies, check overprinting etc.). I was misled to believe that I'm demanding too much help from the designer (i.e. "I want him to do my homework"), but in fact, these are just basic guidelines, not some kind of an extra favour.
The printshop guy (i.e. the good guy in this story) confirmed that indeed, they do not follow any particular CMYK standard, but I see that their output settings say FOGRA27. This confirms that you cannot just export without any standard, you have to pick one. I forgot to ask him, did they choose FOGRA27 just because you have to pick something OR maybe they experimented with this profile and it gave them good results? I still don't understand this.
The printshop guy also told me that they strip embeded ICC profiles, which is confusing for me. Like, an image was converted to (let's say) US SWOP and a color profile was attached to it. Then the profile is striped in the printing process, so will this affect the appearance of the image on paper?
Unfortunatelly, the designer never explained me this ICC thing. So I was thinking: to preserve the profiles or not? In short, our "cooperation" was a nightmare.
And btw he promised me to make fonts for me, but they were wrong (like: you hit 'A' and you get 'B' or something) and I had to download a font-editor to put everything in it's place.
Finally I told him (in writting and in a civil manner) that this is not right and I listed his mistakes, but, normally, he denies any wrongdoing and he even claims that I "offended them". Why "them"? Because he counts himself as part of the printshop team, but he's more of a visual artist than a print tech, he's more like an "external collaborator".
Am I at fault in this story? Am I missing something?
Thanks.
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