Creating an ICC color managed PDF portfolio
Creating an ICC color managed PDF portfolio
- Subject: Creating an ICC color managed PDF portfolio
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 09:22:38 +0100
The images look great in photoshop
but washed out in PDF format. I have tried using RBG and CMYK images and
various settings in the distiller dialogue box to no avail.
There are three ways of doing what you want. (1) Save out the images
as tagged Photoshop PDF and assemble them into a multi-page PDF
document in Acrobat 4. (2) Save out the images as tagged TIFF / PDF
and use InDesign to assemble the multi-page document. (3) Take the
hard and winding road and do it in QuarkXPress as follows:
a. Color manage *all* images to the *same* TIFF RGB space in
Photoshop 5X / 6, and forget about tagging the ICC profile.
b. Place the images in QuarkXPress 4.11 with the Quark CMS disabled.
Remember: They are all in the same RGB space.
c. Open the QXP Print dialog, select the Output tab, scroll throught
he Print Colors popup and select Composite RGB. QXP will only produce
RGB PostScript when the Quark CMS is disabled, hence you must
pre-color manage into one and the same space before placing the
images in order to assign an assumed source profile when distilling
the PostScript file later. PostScript doesn't support ICC profiles so
the device independent definition of your RGB images is lost and must
be reassigned later. It's like sending an RGB image without embedding
the profile, and then calling the recipient on the phone to say which
profile to use as source when she loads your image.
d. Print your PostScript to disk.
e. Open Distiller 4.0.5 (forget earlier versions). Set you assumed
source profile filter for RGB to the same profile as your original
Photoshop working space. Set Distiller to Acrobat 4 compatibility and
not Acrobat 3 (!). Set compression options. And set Distiller to tag
all images.
Then it'll work.
PS You can also use the Quark PDF export filter, but there isn't any
advantage as you have to check and doublecheck all settings at each
hand-off stage anyway.
PPS There are other ways through QuarkXPress to Distiller. You can
create EPS Lab and PDF Lab out of Photoshop 5X / 6, or tagged EPS RGB
and tagged PDF RGB. QuarkXPress will not strip out embedded source
color space information from encapsulated PostScript and PDF objects
when generating PostScript so they'll still be there when Distiller
4.0.5 picks them up. But again it's simpler to save color managed PDF
out of Photoshop and assemble the multi-page document in Acrobat.
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Henrik Holmegaard, TechWrite
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Toelloesevej 69, 2700 Broenshoej, Denmark
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