Using InDesign's Drop Shadow Effects. Good or Bad?

[iRuss]

I'm laying out a book in InDesign 5.5. The book gets sent as a PDF to the book publisher. The book has about 400 photos in it that many are wrapped in the text (Text Wrap). My question is: What are the pitfalls or problems that might accrue if I apply a drop shadow to the photos using InDesign's drop shadow feature?

I see two check boxes in the Drop Shadow Effects dialog box:

Object Knocks Out Shadow & Shadow Honors Other Effects. I'm guessing I want the object to knock out the shadow?

[rob day]

The HP Indigo profile I linked to above is closer to SWOP than Sheetfed.

[rob day]

When I do find out, what are the steps I need ot change the icc?

In ID you choose Edit>Assign Profiles>Assign CMYK Profile and choose from the pop-up

In PS you load the profile as per Peter's instructions,and then you also have to make sure the working Gray space you've loaded is assigned to the grayscale image—that's Edit>Assign Profile>choose Working Gray.

[iRuss]

Rob & Peter, thank you some much for your help. but I think I'm more confused than when I started this whole thing. I've never been able to grasp Adobe's color managemnet concept since they indroduced it way back in PS 5, or 5.5, (not CS5.) I liked the days when I had a soft proof done and I calibrated my monitor to it. A bit old fashion I know. But beleive it or not, my colors were spot on. I did learn some new stuff like checking my values in ID and Acrobat to see if they match up with Photoshop's. I think as long as they all match, I'm good to go. With the book I will be able to get a proof of it before they print the run. So if something is off with the images, I can do my corrections.

Again, thank you for your kindness, and patience with me.

[rob day]

I liked the days when I had a soft proof done and I calibrated my monitor to it.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that now, but it would only work if you were always preparing jobs for one press. If you had three jobs, one for sheetfed coated, one for a web press, and one for news print, you'd quickly run into a mess because you'd have to change the profile of your monitor every time you worked on a file—those three press conditions will produce different color from the same values.

CMYK profiles also have some subtlties that you can't acheive by adjusting your monitor. Modern profiles will show the difference between blacks with different amounts of CMY in them, or different ink sets—no amount of monitor adjusting will show those differences.

Here are different blacks for uncoated. The preview shows what would happen on press with different CMY amounts. This is why ID flattens out your grayscales because black only on press is never absolute black:

[iRuss]

Hey Rob, I hear what you are sying and I aggree. I do about one book a year. The book I did last year came out pretty well. I mostly design book covers in Photoshop and Illustrator. But my main focus is video editing these last few years. This book I'm working on now might be my last book for awhile. So if I have to set my monitor to a setting that works close enough for this book I'm working on now, that would be fine for me.

Thanks,

[rob day]

So if I have to set my monitor to a setting that works close enough for this book I'm working on now, that would be fine for me.

You don't have to adjust your monitor. For grayscales there is Custom Dot Gain which gives you a curve dialog that allows you to adjust the display of grayscales with out changing the output numbers (Color Setting>Gray>Custom Dot Gain...):

If you adjust your monitor without creating a new monitor profile it will generally break color management in all of the Adobe apps.

[iRuss]

Very nice! Thank you for that tip, Rob. I will use it.

[rob day]

I think POD is usually an HP Indigo so you could search for HP Indigo Profiles. Here's one for semi matte paper:

http://www.newselfpublishing.com/HPIndigo.zip

Just make sure you don't do any converting, otherwise your grayscales will get converted to 4-color.

[rob day]

But I came across this. I went to View>Proof Setup>Custom and picked "Generic CMYK"

Proof Setup shows you what will happen if you convert to the setup profile sometime in the future, so it's not helpful because you won't be converting to Generic CMYK.

What system are you using and what't your ID document's CMYK profile? You can check the doc profile by choosing Edit>Assign Profiles...

[rob day]

Do I now need to do a "Covert to Profile" to all my Grayscale images before bringing them into InDesign, or just leave them alone?

Convert to Profile is not an option if you want to use a CMYK profile as the Gray space. If you use a CMYK profile as the destination when you convert to profile the mode will change to CMYK, so you definately do not want to do that.

Loading a CMYK profile as the Gray working space simply previews the gray values as they would print on the black plate of the CMYK press printing to the chosen profile's spec's.

Not sure where Separation Preview is in ID.

Window>Output>Separations Preview

[Peter Spier]

First, make sure you are in Photoshop (presumably you are or you wouldn't see Load Gray), then when you click the Load Gray link a dialog should open. With luck it will already be open to the folder on your system where ICC profiles are stored, and all you have to do is pick the same profile that's listed for CMYK in your color settings, whcih you can read in the field above the grayscale field you are working on. If you don't see profiles, you'll have to navigate to the correct folder. On Windows that would be C:\Windows\System 32\Spool\drivers\color and on Mac I think it's the Color Sync folder, probably in the system Library (search for *.icc and something ought to come up).

Save this custom settings file someplace conveneinet and use it in ID as well (synch through Bridge, if possible).

Unless you can get an accurate profile from the printer, though, you are shooting in the dark and may not get what you expect regardless of what you do on your end. In such cases the best bet is to see if they can accept a PDF/X-4 file which leaves your colors unchanges and embeds the profiles for their RIP to do the conversion. Not all of the print-on-demand type of service providers will accept that, however.