Colour Printing Help

[tom438]

Hi folks, I'm looking for a bit of help with colour issues when printing.

I'm currently making a brochure using vector images and photographs. The photos have been put through photoshop to extract the backgrounds and alter colours slightly. They are then being placed in illustrator in the layout for the brochure. The .ai files are then placed in indesign to create the final layout with facing pages, then exported as an X1A PDF.

The problem I'm having is that in the PDF the colours (particularly the blacks) look washed out. I'm guessing this has to do with the difference between CMYK and RGB.

Is there any way to fix this and keep the colour as close to the original as possible?

Thanks.

 

[MDARFUS]

Is your Illustrator Document Color Mode set to CMYK or RGB? (File Menu –> Document Color Mode)

 

[tom438]

Is your Illustrator Document Color Mode set to CMYK or RGB? (File Menu –> Document Color Mode)

Illustrator is set to CMYK. Would changing the colour mode in photoshop from RGB to CMYK improve the colours?

 

[citizenzen]

Although there's more than one way to skin the cat, if you're placing the photos in Illustrator and than placing that illustrator in InDesign you're taking one step too many.

It doesn't sound as if you're doing anything in Illustrator that couldn't be done directly in InDesign. So that would be my first suggestion, just skip the AI step.

 

[macuser453787]

Would changing the colour mode in photoshop from RGB to CMYK improve the colours?

Yes that would most definitely be the thing to do for your links. Do the RGB to CMYK conversion in Photoshop for all your raster images and then relink them in the illustrator layout.

As the other poster suggested, you can skip Illustrator and do your layout in InDesign if you want to and if it's easy for you to do. If not, you should be able to save your PDFs directly from Illustrator.