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Hi @oliver_5572 , One thing that jumps out in the PDF is the use of the Registration swatch—you should use either an RGB or rich black CMYK swatch for black text and fills:
Was this the actual PDF sent to print?
Outside of the missing bleed, I’m curious how it was exported, as the metadata indicated it was last saved using something other than InDesign’s PDF export library.
What are you Color Settings for InDesign?
What is your Transparency Blend Space?
What are your usual PDF export settings?
While I wait for those answers, this is what I’ve found:
The PDF attached here by itself is fine***. It does have live transparency, and is a mix of RGB and CMYK objects, but at some point during the prepress workflow it was indeed flattened, and after that some mismanagement came into play. It seems after it was flattened, the flattened objects were converted to CMYK with a different color profile than the rest of it. Say your flattened objects were flattened according to a GRACOL profile (if that was what your Color Setting for Document CMYK specified), while their RIP uses something else, like Web Coated; this would apply to all the non-flattened objects.
There’s too much here to figure out exactly what went wrong, so this is a general explanation, but the lack of a proof is a problem; this issue should have shown there and it could have been addressed. Also: it speaks of a lazy prodcution crew; they should have seen the problem well before it even hit the press, and even the pressman should have flagged it to question it.
I test-flattened your PDF for page 11. On that page the white title is an RGB object against a CMYK background, so when flattened, both the Transparency Blend space and the Profile assigned to your document will affect how it’s flattened to CMYK. In my example, if I view it in Acrobat using the the Output Simulation profile of GRACOL, it all looks fine, as that profile is applied to all objects on the page. However, if I switch it to Web Coated, you can see how it affects the appearance of just the non-flattened objects.
[*** mostly fine. There are several pages where the text and some backgrounds used Registration colour (100C 100M 100Y 100K). This should be changed to just 100K for the text and a nice Rich Black for the background (e.g. 40C 30M 30Y 100K); 400% ink coverage is too much. ]
Thank you so much for your help and feedback! I really appreciate it.
I attached a PDF with screenshots of our export settings. (I was not involved, but I am 99% sure these are the settings that were used). And yes, that PDF is the one we sent to print.
Here are our color settings:
Our Transparency Blend Space is CMYK.
So it sounds like to avoid this problem in the future, the objects should be converted to CMYK before they are placed into InDesign? Or is there an export settings/color settings fix that could avoid this?
Again, thank you so much!
"the objects should be converted to CMYK"
Not necessarily, no. You could, but it shouldn't be necessary.
There's nothing inherently wrong with your settings, but I think you might want to ramp up a bit. Instead of High Quality export setting, you could go to Press Quality, and then in the Output Section (screen grab 1), rather than No Color Conversion, you select Convert to Destination, making sure your Destination is the same as your Color Settings, i.e. US Web Coated. You could include Destination Profile blow that so that the RIP (assuming it's smart) will recognize what you are trying to match. This will convert everything (except for spot colors) to the same CMYK color space.
That being said, US Web Coated is pretty oldschool. You might ask your printer what profile they use or recommend, e.g GRCAOL or FOGRA are pretty common these days and are better suited to modern printing. Then uses that in your Color Settings / assign it to the document so that you can get the best color fidelity from their workflow.
Normally, I recommend using the PDF/x-4 PDF export settings (screen grab 2), and leave color unchanged, as long as the Destination Profile is included, but since your printer seemed to need to flatten it down, that may be over their RIPs capabilities.
In any case, there's no clear answer as to exactly what settings this print PDF was made with. (as I said, I find it odd it was last saved using the Mac OS Quartz driver and not InDesign PDF library)
The problem may have been manifested at the printer, but without a proof, there's probably not much you can do except try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
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