Background Color Mismatch with Text/Objects in Print, But Not in PDF

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. ]