out of gamut warning

[cmp7112]

InDesign will not let me use dark blues, greens or purples and it gives me an error message saying "out of gamut warning."  What do I do to fix this?

[Peter Spier]

I think you must be confused. Indesign does not give gamut warnings...

[rob day]

If you make an RGB or Lab swatch that is out-of-gamut to your document's CMYK space an out-of-gamut warning shows in the swatch dialog. When you use the color it will stay in the RGB gamut unchanged as long as you don't have transparency anywhere on the page with the default CMYK Transparency Blend mode selected, or you don't have Overprint/Separation Preview turned on:

No transparency, Overprint Preview off.

a transparent object on the page with a CMYK Transparency Blend space

[Peter Spier]

Ah. I was looking in the color picker for the warning, and curiously it's not there.

[cmp7112]

Thanks Rob.

I am not sure how you were able to get the search option box to appear. When we type in those color levels the correct color shows but it does not allow us to apply it to what we need.  One thing I noticed your screenshot has the exclamation point as well. any other suggestions?

[rob day]

I am not sure how you were able to get the search option box to appear

You mean Swatch Options right? There are 2 panels for color Swatches and Color. You can use the Color panel for apply color once to a selected object. Or you can use the Swatches panel to make a new swatch and apply it to multiple objects—select the object and click the swatch.

[Anasuiya Gupta · Accepted solution]

The phrase "out of gamut" refers to a range of colors that cannot be reproduced within the CMYK color space used for commercial printing. Graphics software is designed to work with images in the RGB color space throughout the editing process. The RGB color space has a much wider range of discernible colors than CMYK. When you print an image it must be reproduced with inks and these inks cannot reproduce the same range of colors that we can see with our eyes. Because the gamut of color that can be reproduced with ink is much smaller than what we can see, any color that cannot be reproduced with ink is referred to as "out of gamut." In graphics software, you often will see an out of gamut warning when you select colors that will shift when an image is converted from the RGB color space used in the editing process, to the CMYK space used for commercial printing.

[Guest]

Thank you. This makes complete sense.