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Dabatross
Known Participant
January 12, 2018
Answered

Colors changing on PDF export from indesign

  • January 12, 2018
  • 14 replies
  • 116092 views

I attached an image that shows how a teal color I'm using changes color when it's exported in Indesign. The image on the left is what ithe arrows are supposed to look like in Indesign and the one on the right is what happens to the teal arrows when its in PDF form. Any idea on why the color is getting desaturated on export to PDF?

Correct answer tylerabaya

Sorry to revive an old thread. But I just had this problem and figured it out for my situation. If you have the problem again, make sure you the PDF you're opening it with is through Adobe Acrobat and not the built in Windows 10 default program. It looks like that program completely changes the hues in PDF's.

When I opened in Acrobat all the colours for me were correct. I didn't need to re-save or change anything in my document settings or export settings. It was just the poor codec or something that Windows 10 uses.

14 replies

Dabatross
DabatrossAuthor
Known Participant
January 13, 2018

I use adobe reader to check how the PDFs look, I will try acrobat and then change those settings in adobe reader and see if that changes anything.

Dabatross
DabatrossAuthor
Known Participant
January 13, 2018

I have It set to no color conversion and the document is in rgb mode, any idea why this would still be happening?

Frans v.d. Geest
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 13, 2018

If you check the PDF in Acrobat Pro, the colors of the elements are in RGB? In which program are you viewing the PDF, in Acrobat on a desktop? Remember that Apples Preview is not rendering PDF very well.

Frans v.d. Geest
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 12, 2018

Well, when the colours are RGB and you export with conversion to CMYK in the PDF this is of course normal if some RGB colour areas are out of the CMYK gamut. You can always perform a softproof on screen to check this of course.

Bill Silbert
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 12, 2018

When exporting your pdf make sure that Color Conversion is set for "No Color Conversion" in the Output section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog Window. See screen shot:

Participant
May 25, 2020

Thank you Bill.  I searched long and hard for a simple answer to my problem of the colour changing when I exported from an Indesign file to a PDF for print and you solved my problem with one simple answer. Great thank you so much. Checking the 'no colour conversion box did the trick.