Newbee Needs Help regarding PDF OUTPUT Designer Pro X10

[BobH]

Hi-

Am in a bit of a crunch and any fast help would be GREATLY appreciated!

I sent the front side (of a 6 x 9 direct mail card PDF) to a printer and was happy
to hear that he said it was perfect and good to go. Prior to sending, I had clicked
to view the SHOW PRINTER COLORS and adjusted a few of the colors to
brighten some or whatever.

Then I had to create the back side of the card that has a lot of text and a lot
of BLUE. Knowing the blue screen colors would print much darker, I clicked the
simulate printer colors again and lightened all the blues. I then, returned
to the "screen color" option and of course saw the extremely LIGHT blue changes
appearing in that mode.

I then exported a PDF "for commercial printing" but the blue I see on the
PDF ...... ISN'T the extreme bright blue I see in XARA.

WITH THAT SAID...

Is XARA outputting it's own interpretation of this blue to achieve what
I adjusted in SHOW PRINTER COLORS?

I exported a JPEG and it is exact to what I see.

I'm truly confused now on what to send to the printer.

Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Bob

[mwenz]

Bob, Xara applications are not color managed. At their heart they are rgb applications. The show printer colors is usually pretty off and cannot be depended upon. I design in XDP mainly using a cmyk swatch book and use the values for color anytime it is critical.

Extreme blues greens and reds will especially be muted in cmyk because cmyk cannot reproduce those colors. It has a smaller gamut than rgb does, which is why your jpeg looks like your screen. The jpeg is rgb.

Mike

[BobH]

Bob, Xara applications are not color managed. At their heart they are rgb applications. The show printer colors is usually pretty off and cannot be depended upon. I design in XDP mainly using a cmyk swatch book and use the values for color anytime it is critical.

Extreme blues greens and reds will especially be muted in cmyk because cmyk cannot reproduce those colors. It has a smaller gamut than rgb does, which is why your jpeg looks like your screen. The jpeg is rgb.

Mike

Thanks for the info Mike. Now I've got to get a CMYK book.

STILL CONFUSED though on why my PDF doesn't look like my xara screen when others do. SEE ATTACHMENT anyone?

[mwenz]

The colors are different for the precise reasons I stated.

To expand a bit on the pdf aspect. Because Xara applications are not color managed, there is no document color space other than the rgb monitor profile in use. Which isn't color management per se, just a means of mapping color values to screen pixels.

Because there is no color management and hence no document color space, rgb color values, when output to a cmyk pdf from Xara applications, they get converted from rgb to an output condition. By default this output condition is a generic one, but it is faithful to its rendering intent.

The best advice I can give is when something is intended for commercial printing is to design in cmyk (and be careful of 100% black). And do so using known cmyk values. The pdf will be created using those values for most output. There are exceptions to this depending on the output condition but in general one does not need to be concerned with those exceptions.

[mwenz]

Bob,

Using your low res screen shot, for the dark blue parts, try a value of c=100, m=98, y=13, b=4

If your Xara application is not set to use percentage, you'll need to change that in the options dialog. But I think those values are close.

Mike

[BobH]

Bob,

Using your low res screen shot, for the dark blue parts, try a value of c=100, m=98, y=13, b=4

If your Xara application is not set to use percentage, you'll need to change that in the options dialog. But I think those values are close.

Mike

Mike...I thank you for all of your advice and thoughts. Couple questions. 1. In options dialog, to what "percentage" are you referring? 2. Would something affordable like the Galaxy Color Map Pro (galaxygauge.com) suffice for my entry level work in finding "known" cmyk colors...or do I need to buy something for a $100+? Again, thank you for taking your time to lend assistance! ;-)

[mikeymopar]

....Again, thank you for taking your time to lend assistance! ;-)

ditto. very good info and easily understood. i didn't know there was such a difference with black values until you brought it up and i googled it. thx mike

[mwenz]

Hi Bob,

This section of the Options dialog...this is from XDP X9 and don't know what Xara application you are using.



As for color books, unfortunately the ones I use to recommend are no longer available. The company appears to have gone out of business.

I'll look at a couple others at my home office when I get back there. Jim Krause makes a few color books but I don't remember how complete the color values are (the range of steps). These would be affordable.

Mike

[mwenz]

Hi Mikey,

In Xara applications that I have used (various versions of XDP), even when using the color editor set to CMYK, just having the slider for 100% black doesn't actually mean that it is and usually exports 100% black as a CMYK mix. So with an object or objects selected that one wants to be 100% Black, one needs to move the Black slider down (to the left) and then back to 100% Black again.

This has been broken (broken is my opinion) since I began using XDP with version 6. I cannot imagine this would be hard to fix by Xara. And maybe it is in version X10...but until some other things are fixed and at the very minimum including OpenType feature support, I am not going to upgrade.

Mike

[BobH]

Mike W: Okay on the percentage. Yes, I did have it on that setting. (Version 10) ALSO...tried your BLUE recommendation and when I rendered it to PDF, it came out on screen as a nice NAVY and very close to what I was looking for. Perhaps the blue I had WASN'T a "KNOWN" CMYK blue so neither app knew quite how to render it?

Now, when it comes to a light gray, do I just use a percentage of black, i.e.: 0,0,0,30? I went online for a CMYK reference and found a bright red that worked as well.

SO...with that said, it looks as though some colors make it through to PDF (as I see them in XARA) and others don't. Interesting. From here on out, I'll take your advice and use KNOWN CMYK colors and go from there.

The printer I'm using is a really great guy and has been helping me get back up to speed in this world. AND MAY I SAY...you TOO are a really nice guy for taking this time to help a neophyte. THANK YOU!


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