Colors in PDF -- maybe yes, maybe no; also Acrobat vs Distiller 1

[WardXmodem]

One of the other threads mentioned things created in Front Page don't have their colors transferred to a PDF.

I noticed that also, particularly when converting presentations from Freelance (not very popular) to PDF (anyone can view it). I often got very muted or absent colors when doing so, yet other times it was OK. Perhaps the "OK" ones were PowerPoint, not sure.

Reading the thread reminded me of that old problem (haven't needed it lately). So I tried - I took an intensely blue background .prz file and printed to pdf - sure enough the background was more of a turquoise than an intense dark blue color spread.

Then I went into help and read about color management, and the settings, etc, but I could only find them in the "distiller". So I realized - I think of acrobat as a reader, a "creator", and a printer, and I think of distiller as something that takes .ps files and converts to .pdf. However, if that were the case why would the color management only be in the Distiller? Well, then I realize the little spinning whirligig icon in the tray is "distiller" when I am printing to a PDF, so maybe distiller is always used under the cover, so I experimented a bit with the settings / edit / colors tab in Distiller - and at least changing to US Prepress didn't make the blue any more intense... I tried "saturation", "CIE" (the help said this was the only truly device independent color related item) and none of these changed the PDF output to the intense blue.

SO what DOES determine input => output color matching, if not those Distiller settings? And thus if I find one of those documents that removes colors, what might I look at to fix them? (Not a high priority, as I've not needed it lately) . . . But perhaps we could also answer the issue of why Front Page didn't produce color output.

 

[ChokingMyTrap]

What sounds to be the issue here is, Microsoft Powerpoint, Word.. just about all of office products other then Publisher use strictly RGB colour. RGB being the spectrum of light has the largest gamut, all the colours of the rainbow. Printers on the other hand run off the CMYK, Cyan Magenta, Yellow and Black which has a smaller colour gamut. Colours you use in RGB like bright reds, bright greens, and most of all the bright blue, a printer has to transform all this information to something that it can output in CMYK. If it’s a colour that it cant reproduce, it picks the closest colour it can print, so your nice bright RGB blue turns into this dull purple.

Your not printing you say, your making PDF’s. Acrobat is directed mostly towards printers (but not limited to). You get you file all ready, PDF it, and its in stone for the printer. No more worrying about collecting your fonts, collecting your images.. ect, everything is intact as it was on your computer. Acrobat is most likely converting your colours for press or printing. Your RGB colours are getting converted to CMYK, which would be what you would get if you were to print.

What you need to do is create postscrips of your Powerpoint file, then load up Distiller, Try the Web setting, or create your own settings, and under Colour Management, switch it off. Should be good then.

 

[WardXmodem]

Thanks! I was surprised when I heard Kinkos would accept PDF as a "print format", I had only used it as a "store for browsing and searching" document format. But apparently some such as you are primarily interested in it as a print related product, and thanks SO much for the explanation!

I was thinking of printing my document directly, then via PDF, and tweaking the PDF until they looked the same, but all that expensive blue ink ... I think I'll just follow your ideas and watch the color that shows up in the PDF.

Thanks again!