Transparent images are being printed with a faint, black transparent background

Question

Hello community. So I have something of a mystery, involving InDesign and perhaps Photoshop. I am working on a magazine which requires a lot of images with transparent backgrounds to be placed in it.

The images have a CMYK Euroscale Coated v2 colour profile and I cut the images out in Photoshop, often using the magic wand tool. The images are then placed in the InDesign document. It looks fine in InDesign, it looks fine when viewing using proof colours and the exported PDF also looks great but the magazine has come back from the printer and a handful of the images (far from all), have been printed with a dark but very faded transparent block around them. I have no idea why. There must be something specific to a handful of images which is creating this strange discolouration but I can't detect what that could be.

I'm attaching a pic of how the elements were printed along with one of the .psd files which ended up being printed with the box around it.

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

rob day · Accepted Answer

If you are making the conversions to CMYK in Photoshop, then it’s not an RGB workflow—you can place profiled RGB images in InDesign and convert to CMYK either at Export or let the printer do it at output. As long as the RGB images have an embedded profile, a color managed conversion can happen anywhere.

Ah sorry, to be more clear I have both an RGB and CMYK process and when I'm using the RGB process, I resave all my images in Photoshop with an embedded Adobe RGB (1998) profile.

Thank you though, your advice here has been invaluable to me. I'm seeking to become more skilled in In Design and this whole area of colour reproduction. Could I ask if there is a specific book, tutorial series or any other resource you would recommend I could follow to become more proficient with In Design and specifically, correctly preparing items for print?

Even for a CMYK offset press, you don’t need to make the conversion to CMYK in Photoshop (the PS action you are showing in one of your captures). The conversion to CMYK on an InDesign Export results in the same CMYK values you would get from a PS conversion.

The problem with making any CMYK conversions in the image editing process is, it makes it harder if the the press profile changes in the future, e.g. you move from a Coated Fogra profiled press to an Uncoated GRACoL press.

You might look at Linked In learning (formerly Lynda.com)—they have some color management tutorials.

rob day · Answer

Hi @chrischav14574321 , Is the magazine being printed on an offset press or is it some kind of composite short run printer (Euroscale Coated v2 is an offset press profile)? Composite printers usually have drivers that expect RGB color and the driver makes the conversion into the final print space. The problem you are showing usually happens when the driver cannot flatten live transparency or color manage CMYK color properly.

No sure if this helps but you don’t need to remove the backgrounds of your icons—they can be saved a flattened grayscales or Black & White bitmaps and have colors applied in the page layout. Here’s your PSD saved as a flat Grayscale. In InDeign the grayscale image has Black applied and it’s container frame has green applied:

More details on Grayscale and Bitmap coloring here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/changing-background-color-to-transparent-in-a-bw-image/td-p/13076699

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