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How to get the best color results

Forum Index > Printing & Prepress > How to get the best color results
2008-10-01 08:45:15
Bigelow27
Registered: Oct 1 2008
Posts: 2

When a customer sends a pdf using CMYK and spot colors, we must convert it to CMYK for our printing press. When we used the "convert to generic CMYK" option, the result doesn't look quite as good as the original - in this case, the yellow seemed more tan/brownish. The spot colors in this case were red and black.
Our customer says other printers (newspapers) were able to work with the pdf (generated from Adobe PageMaker) as it was sent, but I suspect they had to convert it as well. We're using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8, and we paginate in QuarkExpress 7.31.
Any thoughts on what we could do differently to maintain colors more true to the original work?

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 8.1.2, Macintosh
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2008-10-06 11:30:53
#1
rhickey
Registered: Sep 27 2007
Posts: 84
I think your best approach to this matter would be to have your customer submit only CMYK content to you in the first place. Set up a workflow for them to do this... If they're using InDesign or Quark for their layout application upstream tell them to use the process spot color pantone book as a reference for assigning the CMYK swatch colors instead of spot. That's assuming your press can reproduce the colors in that book.

Do you use a RIP (raster image processor) to create plates for offset or do you in fact print to a digital press (toner based). Many RIPs use an editable spot color dictionary to assign CMYK values to spot color called out in the .PS print file. If so, this may be an answer. I'm guessing you don't though.

Another option would be to use PitStop pro (an Acrobat plug-in) to convert spot to CMYK values in the PDF with accuracy and some level of automation for reoccurring spot colors... It might be worth the investment to you for this alone, but it does much more too.
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