Printing "white" color on "Paper" color with indeisgn

Hi Yosef,

I would like to know if the steps suggested above worked for you, or the issue still persists.

Kindly update the discussion if you need further assistance with it.

Thanks,

Srishti

Keep in mind that in (InDesign) "presentation view" the photoshop white appears much whiter than InDesign paper white. (Attached is a screenshot example)

To affect the appearance of the [Paper] swatch relative to the process color print output values, you have to turn on Overprint or Separation Preview. So with Overprint Preview turned off an image's white pixels display as absolute white, which is not what will happen on press:

With Overprint/Separation Preview turned on an image's white pixels display relative to the [Paper] swatch color. Note that the Separation panel shows the output value of the background pixels as 0|0|0|0 even though I have spec'd my [Paper] swatch as a gray:

the printer company requested that I use a background in order to fill bleed.

When you export from InDesign the bounding box is the document's page dimension—the paper color has no affect. If you need to add a bleed amount you do that from the Export dialog's Marks and Bleed tab.

Well, [Paper] works in strange ways.

1. The colour shown for [Paper] which you choose is intended only to show you what will happen if you print on paper that colour. It is used for the background and for objects set to [Paper] colour. Of course the colour is not printed; if you have pink paper the last thing you want is to print pink ink as well.

2. In exporting PDF, the colour shown for background paper is not sent to the PDF. The background stays transparent. BUT, big difference, objects that were set to colour [Paper] are sent to the PDF as white (instead of leaving a hole). This becomes very relevant if the PDF is to be placed as a graphic.

3. In exporting PNG it is different again. The paper background is exported as white. But objects marked as [Paper] are exported as the paper colour. Thus, we can go from a design containing one black box with a [Paper] box on it like this

to a PNG like this:

Is this what you'd expect? Not sure. This was exported with the default settings, transparency OFF. With transparency on we see

(this app is showing the background as very dark grey but we can still see the pink box).

My message from these tests: by all means set the colour [Paper] to show the results on colour paper, and nothing else. Never create objects in [Paper] colour because the results vary wildly according to your workflow.

What format is your Placed image?

The paper will be the white of the paper (unless you choose to overprint the paper with a coloured tint).