Last advice – Find a printer in which everyone is on the same page(mindset) with you.
Best way – package the Indesgn file and zip it.
Do this on all files to be printed before sending(on PDF do not compress or optimize).
If you can’t do this, at least use Adobe Professional Acrobat and view it in the separated view. My advice to graphic designer’s as well as print buyers is to invest in a postscript printer – and separate it. The customer is right, even when he’s wrong. We had a sign hanging in our room – It said this – After the customer is notified it is the customers descision whether to fix it – re-plate it or take it off the press. It is common knowledge ,as well as common sense that customers don’t want cmyk for their type – unless it is big type and undercolor is used. I cannot even count the number of times I have called the CSR’s and told them that this job can’t go to press. This I know for a fact – any pressman would have a fit running it. This I can say for certain – someone saw it and made the decision to let it go. Even then the pressman should have called the Production Manager. While one cannot see all problems on the proof, one can clearly see it on the plates before it goes to press. This job should of been caught when plating by the pre-press and for sure by the pressman. If I where the print buyer(you Jacque), I would pay for the job to be re-plated and nothing more. This post may be alittle late to help Jacque and his 40k print job, but here is my take on it. However to fix it, one would need the original art work files and export it themselves. I do not know any printer that would run such a file without telling the customer, or fixing it. My last note is this – a rgb or converted cymk color file is unusable for 2 color spot.
We all respond back to our customers that the file has separated into 4 color or rgb and many respond back and do not know how to fix the problem. I have many friends in pre press and we defiantly talk about how over the years, 2 color spot has become a lost art. My advice is this – always take your exported pdf to Acrobat and view the separation preview to see if the spot colors have been retained. However, for 4 color offset with spot or 2 color spot it is a different story. I believe this is the greatest problem printers have today.įor a digital press (fancy copier) one can get away with not knowing what their file really represents. I have been working in offset printing for over 30 years.
I’m sure this is not the only cause for unwanted 4-color blacks in PDFs, but it feels like a little patch of quicksand in InDesign that you should know about! If you still see text or images, then it’s likely the Smallest File Size preset, or one based upon it, was used instead. If the INDD file was exported to PDF using the Press-Ready or PDF/X1-a PDF presets (and assuming everything else was set to default CMYK print settings in InDesign), all page elements should disappear as soon as you choose Show: RGB. Here’s the same file, exported with the Smallest File Size PDF preset:Īnother “tell” that a PDF was exported with the Smallest File Size PDF preset is to click on the Show dropdown menu in this same Output Preview dialog box and change it from “All” to “RGB:” This PDF (exported using the Press-Ready or any PDF/X preset) is fine?Process Black is 100% and the other process colors are 0%: Hover your cursor over something that should be 100% black (like where my cross-hair cursor is below, over the capital S) and look at the ink percentages next to the process plate names.
If you want to check your own PDFs for the same problem, open them up in Acrobat Pro 8 and choose Advanced > Print Production > Output Preview. But when I saw in Acrobat Pro that my export of his INDD file to PDF came out fine (a 2-color job, black and a spot color), while his PDF of the same INDD file was a 5-color job, I had to conclude there was something glitchy in his PDF Export settings. I didn’t figure this out right off the bat, of course. That means that 100% Black gets converted to an RGB mix in the PDF, and when the RGB black is sent to a CMYK device, it gets re-converted to something like C75 M68 Y67 K90. What he forgot–and it would be nice if the Description field included this factoid–was that the Smallest File Size preset also converts all CMYK colors (and sometimes, spot colors in placed EPS files) to sRGB: He tweaked it for commercial printing by including crop marks, bleed allowance, and changing the compression settings so images wouldn’t be downsampled so much. It turns out that Mark had wanted to reduce the size of the PDFs he was uploading to the printer’s FTP site, so he created a custom PDF Export Preset that was based on the Smallest File Size one that comes with InDesign. More after the jump! Continue reading below↓įree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today.