ukzembla
Participant
ukzembla
Participant
Activity
‎Nov 15, 2023
04:37 AM
I've just done this and created 2 files from your psd (one run with your action/profiles) and one with a 'straight' conversion via 'convert to profile'. I see that the one using your steps is more neutral and has a more subtle range of tones. Is that what I should be seeing? I have another file that needs to be converted from greyscale to CMYK 4C. Is this advisable and how would you do it? With the same workflow?
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‎Nov 14, 2023
05:35 PM
Thank you so much! Did you make / alter these yourself? I'm not totally sure I know where to start here, or how to check the accuracy of what I'm liable to get out - any pointers / links to other threads where this has been dealt with?
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‎Nov 14, 2023
08:41 AM
5 Upvotes
Hi, I've been asked by a printer / client to adapt a 4-color black and white image using heavy GCR to prevent any color cast and ensure the K channel is dominant. I've been advised to do this by using Convert to Profile / Custom CMYK and adjusting the GCR black generation to Heavy. I've also read elsewhere that Custom CMYK is some sort of 90s aberration and it's better to pull out your eyes than use it. What's the best way of getting good results here? They're only asking me to do this for the black and white images in 4 colours. It's using FOGRA52 uncoated (side-note: converting to a custom profile doesn't include this as an option…).
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‎Mar 29, 2023
11:41 AM
Hmmm, and does Photoshop work in the same way in terms of softproofing? ie it'd need to be done in Acrobat? Thank you so much for all the invaluable advice! If you have any pointers to doing this successfully online in a Youtube video or anything please let me know, otherwise I'll have a forage around!
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‎Mar 29, 2023
07:15 AM
Thanks so much everyone, again. As a rule of thumb, I usually know I'm printing on uncoated paper, and that's about it, but as an approximation, is it reasonable to soft proof in InDesign / Photoshop for greyscale using dot gain of 20–30%, rather than the uncoated CMYK equivalent (if it's not going to be printed on CMY plates)? Results are quite drastically different in overprint preview when I'm looking at greyscale images using dot gain vs e.g. PSO Uncoated v3, which I hadn't realised – is the dot gain preview going to be the more realistic of the two, and the dot gain using a curve like the one @rob day suggested even more accurate for my type of setup (with all the usual provisos of course)? I'm still unsure why printers are asking me not to print at 100% K, since you're both using that in your profiles, but @reproo2773183 is I think right that they may be increasing density for print here.
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‎Mar 23, 2023
02:06 PM
Thanks for such a detailed and thought-out reply, Rob! Does it make a material difference that it's books we're working with, and so things move though the press pretty fast, and are pressed + bound not long after? I should perhaps have said too that they're typically made on uncoated paper. There's also the problem of ink transfer onto the facing page (I've temporarily forgotten the term for this, sorry), which I've also been told can be caused by too high an ink density. Do you have experience working with book printers too?
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‎Mar 22, 2023
05:45 PM
Hi, I work on a lot of books for print that just are K plate only. So far I've generally been asked by various printers to manually prevent TAC going over 80–95% depending on the images and the press, and I've always done this using curves in Photoshop on a grayscale image with max + min highlight / shadow. Is there a better way than doing this manually?!… I haven't read a lot on here about people working in black and white so much but there must be lots in the same situation as me. I believe that InDesign just ignores whatever profiles are attached to a grayscale image when it's imported, but you can still export to greyscale with whatever dot gain you want – is that going to be better / worse / more / less work than tweaking things in Photoshop? Thanks! I would ask the printer but … they are quite rarely clear or helpful on profiles.
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‎Feb 17, 2023
07:52 AM
Hi, that doesn't solve the issue – please can you try testing this out? The language presets and defaults are all set to left-to-right, English. The only time it's an issue is when I paste text and InDesign automatically generates a text frame – in which case it automatically overrides the language direction. If I clear overrides, it corrects the position. If I paste into a frame I draw myself with the text tool, the out ports are in the correct location. The issue is with InDesign autogenerating the text frame when I click paste – it should be 1. set with the story writing direction to match that of the document / default; and 2. a [basic text frame] style, not [none] since I'm pasting text, not anything else. I don't really care much about 2. but 1. is important, as it's slow manually drawing a lot of text boxes. Thanks!
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‎Feb 17, 2023
04:11 AM
I mostly typeset English language books but have worked on a few right-to-left titles using Hebrew and Arabic. To do that, I started working with the ME version of InDesign, and mostly everything is fine, except for the fact that when I paste text in from the clipboard the out ports default to being on the left-hand side (for right to left languages). I've done everything I can think of to make this default to the other way round but nothing seems to work – I want English to be the default, since it's 99% of what I do. I've set the preferences / languages and spellcheck to English, closed all docs and altered the default object styles, and there's no change. I think the issue is in the object settings, "Story Options / Story Writing Direction" is defaulting to right to left. When a new text box is auto generated by a paste command (whether from copy-pasting text within InDesign or from outside), it creates a text frame (weirdly styled as "[None]" rather than "[Basic Text Frame]") with an override automatically applied to set the writing direction as right to left. I can clear this, but it's easy to forget and quite annoying. Can anyone suggest if this is a bug or a "feature", and if there's any workaround? Ideally I think when you paste text, if it's creating a new text frame it should be [Basic Text Frame] with no overrides applied! This seems pretty niche as googling "story writing direction" yields all of THREE results - any help much appreciated!
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‎Feb 08, 2023
03:40 PM
Hi there, I've tried using "convert to profile" on an untagged RGB image from Shutterstock or similar into PSO Coated v3, and noticed that the PC produced noticeably different results (much worse / oversaturated) to the Mac. At first I thought that was down to the screen being rubbish, but the CMYK histograms are really noticeably different too – surely they should be identical if they're using the exact same profile for conversion, right? The ICC profile used is, unless I've made some stupid mistake, the same date, and exactly the same number of bytes. Has anyone else seen this behaviour? Is it something to do with the RGB profile of the screens, and Photoshop is trying to copy what the (rubbish) screen is displaying into CMYK? I'm only led to that idea because the converted and unconverted images look identical on both PC and Mac screens (as they should, more or less), but I'd expected the same inputs to have the same histogram output, right? See attached (Mac histogram + image on the left, PC on the right).
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‎Oct 04, 2022
08:27 AM
Has it not been fixed now? I haven't noticed it happening for a while actually… maybe try latest updates + test again?
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‎Jul 06, 2022
12:08 PM
2 Upvotes
Yep, I've still got this issue, it's super annoying and I'm imagining not a very difficult fix. When you're trying to switch between tabs with any regularity, it's just unusable. I'm guessing no one from Adobe actually reads this though…
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‎Mar 28, 2022
03:42 AM
Same issue here. Insanely fast new Mac, but it was taking about 30 seconds to open a file. As opposed to instant on my 10-year old Mac, which was… a disappointment. Also using FontExplorer X, in case that is the issue, but guessing not? Definitely a bug though, please fix ASAP!
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‎Aug 07, 2020
09:03 AM
Thanks, that's really helpful. I'll try asking if the printers are able to work with RGB in PDF/X-4 for future jobs. I've had other printers send me guidelines that don't mention whether a image files are RGB / CMYK / greyscale, and just ask me to export with "no colour conversion" selected (but PDF standard is "None", not X-4). Which makes me very nervous, as I have no idea why they'd ask for that - presumably they'd be converting later on in the process. It's difficult resorting to forums for advice rather than getting actually helpful info from the printers!…
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‎Aug 07, 2020
07:34 AM
Thanks. GRACOL is still 280, but I'm guessing would work OK for the most part (i.e. there may be some bits between 260-280, but as long as it's not massive areas I'm guessing I'd be OK). But I'm also provided with images in CMYK from time to time (sometimes with a sensible profile, sometimes just the generic default…), so may need to convert profile? I've read conflicting things on whether CMYK -> CMYK is a bad idea. Or are you suggesting converting to Adobe RGB in Photoshop, using that and then exporting from InDesign to (e.g.) GRACOL? I've been typesetting books for years, but am still getting my head around printing and colour management; it doesn't help that printers give sparse, unhelpful or totally outdated advice! I think most printers aren't too familiar with standard design / colour management workflows in Photoshop / InDesign.
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‎Aug 07, 2020
06:15 AM
Well, it seems requests like this keep coming up with different commercial printers in Europe, so it definitely wasn't a one-off… So my choices are for situations like this: 1) use a different printer (not my prerogative as I'm supplying print-ready PDFs, not in charge of printing or paying for it); 2) try to get more info out of the printers (can be frustrating as I usually get one-line answers without too much help, and often English isn't a first language); 3) try to fix the TAC myself somehow (I've been told that certain types of paper need different TACs, so perhaps that's the issue). I'm mainly concerned that the colours come out as intended (so I don't want to use a totally different profile for the wrong printer but with the right TAC). In that situation where you don't have that much choice, what would people here do? Is there such a thing as the standard FOGRA52 profile but with a modified TAC? The alternatives I can think of are: convert images to CMYK using another profile (e.g. GRACOL, which is 280 TAC) in Photoshop, then converting that to FOGRA52. Which is a bit of a hassle and I'm unclear how well it would come out – or altering the colours levels myself, which I'm not keen to do. From looking around, it seems that VIGC created some lower TAC versions of standard profiles at the time for this very purpose (there's still one knocking around for FOGRA47 with a TAC of 260), but it doesn't look like it's been updated, and various links I've found online are now dead. Is FOGRA47 with that TAC a reasonable substitute, if the printer is unable to provide their own ICC profile?
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‎Jun 12, 2020
06:03 AM
Thank you for such a detailed example! That really helps illustrate how things work. I am in fact querying things with the printer, perhaps I'm getting conflicting advice from different people in the production chain... but in any case an example like this is super useful.
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‎Jun 10, 2020
06:26 AM
Hm, so when the printer asks for FOGRA52 with a TAC of 260%, what should a sensible person do? I'm guessing the two you mention have other characteristics aside from the TAC, so how to restrict TAC without messing up colours? Thanks again for all your input.
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‎Jun 10, 2020
05:31 AM
Thanks for the help. The only thing is that the printers asked both for FOGRA52 and a max TAC of 260%, but I'm pretty sure FOGRA52 has a max TAC of 300%. Is there a reasonably straightforward way around this?
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‎Jun 10, 2020
02:54 AM
Hi, I'm working on an illustrated colour book, which should be exported with the FOGRA52 profile. The client has said that TAC should be 260% max, though I believe FOGRA52 enforces a max of 300. The client has provided me with CMYK PSDs just using the default CMYK profile (U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2). I suspect the illustrator may just not know much about colour profiles, and I won't be able to get new files from them. I usually get images as RGB, which InDesign then converts upon export to the output profile, but I believe if I import CMYK images into InDesign, then when I have "preserve numbers" set on export (which I am still too scared to change), InDesign will preserve the SWOP profile from the Photoshop files, rather than convert to FOGRA52. So... should I be going into each PSD file, going to convert to profile, then converting to FOGRA52, or is that fraught? And for the TAC, if it's actually 260 max, what's the best (easyish) way to achieve this without spending hours recolouring images? My Photoshop skills are OK, but I'm certainly not an illustrator. I'm not sure if this is something printers can often do in house or not. Thanks for your help in the dark arts of colour reproduction and profiles…
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‎Feb 14, 2019
05:49 AM
Thanks so much for the suggestions, everybody! I've just downloaded the latest version of InDesign (had last tried this autumn last year), switched to single-line composer, removed all grep styles (I did have a few, but mostly they wouldn't have been applied to this book), and have disabled my preflighting and it actually seems quite reasonable to edit now! Story editor is also an excellent idea – I hadn't thought of that, but it actually now looks like it won't be necessary. Thanks so much for the help, I was dreading this but looks like it'll all be fine. I had already stressed that the editing and even some proofreading would be done in Word beforehand, so I'm hoping correx are minimal. As always, it depends very much on the author though.
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‎Feb 14, 2019
04:26 AM
This is an odd question, but I'm going to be typesetting a pretty unusual / experimental book – it's a single sentence and it's going to be about 900–1000 pages long. I've worked on a preliminary draft to test the waters and it seems that InDesign (all versions I've tried) is intolerably slow. I understand why this might be the case, but e.g. placing the cursor on the page and deleting a single character can take upwards of a minute, and if I have any corrections at all to make (and I inevitably will), this is going to become incredibly time-consuming. Could anyone recommend ways of making this more workable? I thought of chopping the book up into several stories, though that's not really ideal since there are no natural breaks and there may be some later reflow as a result of corrections. I don't think doing things like disabling preflight makes much difference, but there is some strange behaviour: e.g. clicking at a point in the text with the mouse gives me spinny wheel for a good minute, but navigating with cursor keys from there is considerably faster – moving left / right / up / down using individual cursor strokes is instant, but to skip a word I get spinny wheel for another minute. Any and all suggestions welcome – even experimenting on ways to speed things up means a lot of waiting around for things that probably aren't going to work!
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‎Oct 02, 2018
03:53 AM
Does anyone happen to know if this has changed in the last (nearly) decade? I'm hoping to import styles from several Word docs with literally hundreds of junk styles, and want to map all character styles to [none] and para styles to a single style.
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‎Nov 23, 2016
06:24 AM
Even if I don't edit the text at all, if I were just to export an older file (also created with the same version of InDesign), it would reflow. Does that mean you can never change the user dictionary without it effectively breaking all of your older files? Or can you embed hyphenation per document?
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‎Nov 23, 2016
06:18 AM
Hi, As a result of getting lots of bad breaks in words (like "eve-rybody") I thought it prudent to add a dozen or so of the most common hyphenation errors to the custom dictionary. However, it seems that when I open an older file now, the alternate hyphenation settings have been applied to them, and the text has reflowed. What's worse, this happens without any suggestion that the text has been modified! So how am I meant to reliably preserve the older files as is, without preventing myself from updating the user dictionary moving forward? This isn't great for books that have been indexed, for instance, and there's no easy way to check what's changed – I'd assumed if there was any text reflow at all I'd get the usual "file modified" asterisk on opening the file. That at least should be there. Is there a way to embed certain hyphenation settings to certain documents? Thanks, Alex
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‎Feb 01, 2016
09:42 AM
Has anyone been able to test whether this bug is carried onto devices that use ADE as a base (various types of Nook etc)?
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‎Jun 08, 2015
10:47 AM
I'm getting the same problem. Anyone else? Older eBooks I'd created on ADE 2 + 3 now look pretty awful on ADE 4 because it's ignoring the CSS to get text to start on the next page. Is there a hack around this that anyone knows of, at least for now?
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‎May 29, 2012
02:05 PM
Thanks for the response. In a perfect world, I wouldn't copy them at all: I want to duplicate the text of a paragraph minus the text anchor but can't find a way of doing it. At least when it's duplicated, it becomes a new anchor rather than some weird copied-by-reference thing. Either way, I need to exclude them from duplication (in which case how can I find them to ignore them) or remove them afterwards (ditto). The only reliable way seems to be tediously going through the indexed position of the character in question against all the destinations, which is a bit of a drag. Something like (for one char - untested!) // with one anchor selected var char = app.selection[0]; var dests = app.activeDocument.hyperlinkTextDestinations; for (var i = 0 ; i < dests.length ; i++) { if ((dests.destinationText.index == char.index) && (dests.destinationText.parent == char.parent)) { // delete char } }
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‎May 29, 2012
01:38 PM
Hi, I'm looking for a way to eliminate hyperlink destination characters (the blue colons) either with Javascript or via grep. The weird thing is that with the following grep: (([[:punct:]]|[[:alnum:]]|[[:space:]])*) …if you select the character on its own and search the selection, it says it's not found (as you'd hope). But if you search a paragraph using that grep, it skips over and includes it (even for a replace). This has to be a bug. So I could loop through each character invoking an InDesign-style find on that selection, but that's a bit of a pain and would be super slow. ID's Javascript doesn't include POSIX support, so that's no good, and when I copy-paste the character in question into ID, it gives me ~l which seems like it ought to work but is never found. This also seems like a probable bug. Any ideas, anyone? Alternatively, the problem I'm trying to solve is: I have a chapter heading (say) with a hyperlink text destination (usually) at the start of it. I duplicate this using JS, and the text destination is also duplicated, and I want to kill it in the duplicated, but not the original version. Hope that makes sense - it's for a table of contents. Cheers, Alex
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‎May 17, 2012
03:14 AM
That looks like it! Just when I thought I'd read every possible attribute... Haven't tested yet but it must be right. Thanks very much. Alex
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