Indesign Colour Settings Question

[simoncmp2019]

Hi all and big thanks in advance.

I am a little confused with what's going on. I thought I had a very good working knowledge of colour settings and profiles but!

I had a customer who was not happy with the colour of some print we did from his pdf's so I did some investigation and fix the problem but had this happen!

I thought that if I placed an RGB image with a profile attached in Indesign and made a press quality pdf set to convert to destination profile and my working destination profile was fogra39 then I would get a CMYK pdf converted to fogra39!

When I view the pdf in Acrobat, Output Preview, it shows all the images are CMYK. If I select Show "RGB" i don't have any RGB images on the page.

However, if I click on the image and open in Photoshop the image opens up in RGB not CMYK.

I thought it would have been converted to CMYK and opened up in CMYK in photoshop.

Whatever setting I tried in colour setting i could not get the image to convert to CMYK in the pdf, it always opened back up as RGB.

PDF output description:

Colours will be converted to the destination profile space only if they have embedded profiles that differ from the destination profile (or if they are RGB colours and the destination profile is CMYK or vice versa). Colour objects without embedded profiles are not converted.

Any ideas people, thanks?

Simon

[rob day]

Whatever setting I tried in colour setting i could not get the image to convert to CMYK in the pdf, it always opened back up as RGB.

Keep in mind that your application Color Settings don’t usually color manage existing documents—it is the assigned profiles that color manage an existing document's colors and swatches, which you can check via Edit>Assign Profiles. Also, you have to use the Link Info panel to check the color space and profile assignment for an image, which could be anything—again Color Settings wouldn't normally color manage a placed link.

When you say you are opening the image, are you extracting the image from the PDF in Acrobat, or opening the PDF from Photoshop? If it is the latter, that would not be reliable because there could be a color conversion during the Photoshop open.

In Acrobat’s Output Preview use Object Inspector to get an image's detailed info—Separations doesn't give you the actual color space of an image. The default Press Quality preset will convert RGB images to the document CMYK profile and not include any profiles because of its Profile Inclusion Policy.

Here I exported a page with a ProPhoto RGB image to Press Quality, and when I click the image, Acrobat‘s Object Inspector shows the the image has been correctly converted to CMYK with no profile (DeviceCMYK):

With Object Inspector you can click on any page item to get its true color space and profile.

[simoncmp2019]

Thanks for your reply.

I am opening the images from the the pdf by right clicking on the image and opening in photoshop.

All my Adobe CC apps have same colour management settings.

I thought if I placed an RGB image on the page in Indesign with a profile attached and then output a pdf with destination CMYK fogra39 it would convert the image to CMYK? this has always been my understanding?

Listen to this:

I have a pdf i created like this.

If i open output preview and select object inspector and click on the image it says "colorSpace DeviceCMYK"

If i then switch to the edit pdf tool and hover over the same image with output preview open object inspector it says"RGB"

Opening the image in photoshop it open as RGB when right clicking and selecting edit in photoshop from Acrobat.

If I do the same test in Acrobat on the PC instead of the Mac it always say CMYK but i dont have Photoshop on the PC to test the open?

PC version of Acrobat DC is 2019.012.20035

MAC version of Acrobat DC is 2018.011.20058

Mac version looks like poss not up to date, not been at this company for long so I will check its up to date but both on current CC license so should be ok.

I think this is very strange.

So why does my CMYK image open in RGB in Photoshop, is it CMYK in the pdf or RGB?

LOL

[rob day]

I am opening the images from the the pdf by right clicking on the image and opening in photoshop.

So why does my CMYK image open in RGB in Photoshop, is it CMYK in the pdf or RGB?

Photoshop doesn't tell you anything about the native color mode of the images on a PDF page, the color mode you get for the imported page is whatever you choose in the Photoshop Import PDF dialog Mode dropdown. A PDF can have a mix of objects with different color spaces on the same page, but a Photoshop document is limited to a single color space, so there has to be a conversion choice:

If i open output preview and select object inspector and click on the image it says "colorSpace DeviceCMYK"

The Object Inspector is accurate—your image is CMYK. Another way to check is with Preflight, here I'm using the List page Objects to get the page info.

All my Adobe CC apps have same colour management settings.

Color Settings only affects your color management preferences for future documents—existing documents normally are color managed with their embedded profiles and policies. The only exception would be if you had the Color Management Policies set to Off when the document was created, or you purposefully stripped the document’s assigned profiles.

[rob day]

I had a customer who was not happy with the colour of some print we did from his pdf's so I did some investigation and fix the problem but had this happen!

What was the output destination for the PDF? Was it separations for an offset press, or some kind of composite printer?

The Press Quality PDF preset exports to the chosen CMYK destination space, but with no profile included, so the destination would have to be an offset press running to the Coated FOGRA 39 standard. If the final output was to some other device, the CMYK color would have no source color profile, which might cause a color management problem at output.