CMYK gradient problem

**Jon G** · 10 August 2006, 01:30 PM

Hi,

I have previously succeeded in making perfect print documents using Xara Xtreme and Acrobat Elements. And I really mean absolutely wonderfully exactly as I wanted them, as I saw on screen.

...but now I have gradients in the document, and I cannot get the end colour match. I have vertical bars that should fade into the background, but I've tried everything (converting the gradient to bitmap gives the same result) and the result is off, ie not the same as the background :-(

There's also a "faded" word, that ends up looking wrong-colored. Please find attached the xara file, I would be very grateful if someone could help me out.

thanks,

Jon

**jamesmc** · 10 August 2006, 01:50 PM

Not sure what vertical bars you are talking about. There were some horizontal bars with a linear fill which showed up fine in the PDF document. The linear fill wasn't exactly as the original document, but doesn't look bad in my opinion.

I use PDF995, a small useful utility. It has several options for printing to PDF as a bitmap, changing to show anti-alias and changing the resolution of transparencies.

**Jon G** · 10 August 2006, 02:02 PM

Oops, I meant horizontal of course.

Thanks for trying, it seems that PDF995 outputs RGB colours, though based on the looks of it. I wonder what coud be wrong...

Acrobat has also quite a lot of settings, the problem could be there.

**Jon G** · 10 August 2006, 02:35 PM

Should I define some colours as spot colours? This is now beyond my skills and I'm sweating

**jamesmc** · 10 August 2006, 02:50 PM

Originally Posted by Jon G

Should I define some colours as spot colours? This is now beyond my skills and I'm sweating

Beyond me too. I usually ask my former brother-in-law who owns a Printing Service if I need to print something. He laughs at my 'goofware' and ends up going through his own methods to make it print ready.

The last big print was for a family reunion, it was a poster that was like 5 feet by 3 feet. There were ten of them and must of have cost some coin, don't know as he contributed the work.

I guess when you own printing presses the size of small trucks, you don't want to print off any old thing as it cost a lot of money to run those monsters. He (former brother-in-law) has no humor when it comes to his business.

**Jon G** · 10 August 2006, 02:58 PM

:-D

I'm afraid this time it's not so much goofware as it is a goofy user :-/

Like I said I've use Xara and direct print to pdf with Acrobat Elements, and the results were perfect... now there's something I've messed up or just don't understand.

I'll try PDF995 now just to see if it works.

**Jon G** · 10 August 2006, 03:11 PM

Nope :-(

same problem with PDF995 as well, the ends of the gradient and the vertical BULGARIA are darker than the background.

**jamesmc** · 10 August 2006, 03:13 PM

Did you convert everything to shapes, including text?

**Jon G** · 10 August 2006, 03:20 PM

I tried that as well, only made the text look worse.

It has also previously been unnecessary... this has something to do with colors on top of each other or something, I guess.

**Egg Bramhill** · 11 August 2006, 01:21 AM

Jon,

This is strange. I simply opened your file and then Export / PDF. As you were finding it looks at first like an error in the horizontal bars, but in fact it's the rectangle behind everything that's not exporting correctly. It exports as a lighter colour.

Try this. open the pdf file that looks wrong. Do a screen grab. Open your XaraXtreme file and past the screen grab. Notice the difference between the background burgundy. Notice that the horizontal bars do have the correct burgundy.

I messed about some more. changed the background rectangle to a shape. This made no difference. However when I applied a linear fill to the background shape, filled from burgundy (#9f1218) to burgundy (#9f1218) so it still had a an apparent flat fill, it exported fine into PDF.

See the attached screen grab from the resultant PDF file. Hope this helps.