Washed Out Colour on pdf's

[Fotoman]

I'm using Quark 5, text & photos on an A5 brochure. Whenever I make a PDF file, saving (printing) to Acrobat Distiller, the colours of the photos on the resulting PDF file are extremely week and washed out. This applies to the text also which appears as dark grey instead of a rich black.

Fonts are downloaded; Setting is to Print.

Is there some setting I am missing?

 

[GordonIt]

I assume your images are individually OK under Photoshop. Anyway as text look also to be wrong, I thing image is not really the issue, it's distiller condition that need to be looked upon.
As text is involved it could also come from a wrong display profile imbedded in the PDF.

If you print from any other apps than Xpress, does it also appears washed out ?
Then most probably the distiller settings is involved, either on transfer function or forcing a wrong ICC profile to be imbedded or applied

Have you try to save a PS file using a generic PS printer PPD with Quark and then running distiller ?
You can also try to print from Phsop on same settings

Look also the distiller tuning in job options "transfer function" and play with it trying to "remove" if any, maybe Xpress set one.

 

[Fotoman]

I think I've sorted the problem. The photos were still as RGB!
I've converted them all to CMYK and it looks a lot better.

Thanks for your interest.