Color Seperation in PDf Files: wrong

[gottwavo]

Hi,

I am producing a two color business card in XaraXtreme Pro, but had similar problems with other kind of documents before. This is the situation:

The business card has a logo using a spot color Pantone something. The text is black. I have "colored" the logo in 100% Cyan and the printer will use the right ink to get the right color.

When I produce a PDF file from my Xara document either with Xara itself or with distiller, the color separation does not work as expected and consequently the print will fail.

When I check the single plates with Acrobat (I have Version 7, but I had the same problem with older versions) I see this:

- the Cyan plate shoes black as well, so do the other color plates, they should show nothing and the Cayn plate should show the logo only
- the black plate shows black, fine.

Is there a trick I don not know?
What do you all do out there in such a case?
Change to an other software from Adobe or Corel?

Any quick help is appreciated.

Regards
Volker Gottwald

[Charles Moir]

Can you send us the file to look at. What you say should work, but perhaps it's an overprint problem. What does show printer plates show in Xara? Does that show right?

And are you using CMYK colours or RGB?

[gottwavo]

Charles,
Thanks for asking the right questions back, They already helped to get me on track. Printing the color seperations fron Xara worked with "wrong" colors I used. In fact I had used Cyan defined in the RGB color space instead of using it in the CMYK one. When I changed this it worked. I exported the PDF file and the seperation where perfect as expected.

However, it ist not obvious even for me as an advanced Xara user, that you get this effect by just changing the color space and not the color ...

Thanks anyhow, You saved my day and confidence in Xara, the best graphics software ever.

... after writing this I experimented a little switching back to RGB and it is still OK. It seems I can't get it wrong anymore. Magic?

I will do some more tests and keep you updated.

Volker

[gwpriester]

The shipping version of Xtreme Pro will support spot colors in PDF export so this may well become a non-problem very soon.

See Xara Saved the Best for Last in Workbook 55.

Gary

[cuno]

I had and have the same problem. The colors don't export to PDF/X3 correctly.
They are defined as CMYK-colors (Black 0 0 0 100) but when I measure (with Acrobat) the colors in the PDF/X3-Document Black ist defined as 87 69 45 80.

What can I do?

Thanks in advance & kind regards,
Cuno Vollenweider

[alexbozhenov]

I had and have the same problem. The colors don't export to PDF/X3 correctly.
They are defined as CMYK-colors (Black 0 0 0 100) but when I measure (with Acrobat) the colors in the PDF/X3-Document Black ist defined as 87 69 45 80.

What can I do?

Thanks in advance & kind regards,
Cuno Vollenweider

I checked your PDF, your black (I supposed you have text as Black) is fine -- CMYK 0-0-0-100. Also "TESTLOGO" is 50-0-0-50 -- all as defined in .xar.

Not quite understand you...

[slavelle]

after writing this I experimented a little switching back to RGB and it is still OK. It seems I can't get it wrong anymore. Magic?

Is it because every color in the CMYK space can be created in the RGB space, but there are some in RGB that have to shift to exist in CMYK?

See if this page helps to clarify what I just tried to write: http://dx.sheridan.com/advisor/cmyk_color.html

There is a diagram on there showing the RGB (screen), PANTONE, and CMYK overlaps. If your original RGB color was in on eof those fringe areas, it may have had to move to the inside of one of the blobs, but when moved back to RGB, the color could be represented by either method so it worked.

Does that help? or even make sense?

[steve.ledger]

Scott, did you noticed this thread and the post you quoted is over 2 years old?

Volker hasn't posted here since 17 January 2007.

Can you offer any help to Cuno?

[cuno]

thank you for your fast answer.

I use Adobe Acrobat Prof (Vers. 8) to check the output from Xara and that's what I found out today.

When I open the the exported file for the first time it gives me wrong colors (see xara_pdf1.gif). When I change the simulation-profile to "Coated FOGRA27 (ISO 12647-2:2004)" (or "ISO Coated") it gives me the correct colors (see xara_pdf2.gif). Funny enough is, that it shows the right colors when I go back to the original "FOGRA27"-profile. Could it be, that Acrobat 8 has problems to understand the color-profile provided by Xara? Until now I never had problems with PDF/X-Files generated from InDesign or Illustrator. By the way, this problem doesn't occur when I use a CUSTOM profile (with embeded profile "ISO Coated" or "Coated FOGRA27").

I can life with the workaround I described above but perhabs you could give me an other solution to this problem.

Regards,
Cuno

[Albacore]

Acro is a funny animal, most times it is right and other times wrong. I have had a look at the xar. file and the PDF file and both are correct. Exported your file as a PDF then took it into AI as I find this is reliable method and all colours are correct. I normally don't use the commercial printing check box but go into the advanced and choose Advanced Objects, then select PDF X-3 if I have any bitmap effects or transparencies or if it is plain vector PDF X-1a, if I don't have any special paper I leave it on US Web (recommended), then export it.

Still comes back to the same as Alex stated that everything is fine. Maybe it is you selection of FOGRA which is causing the problem as most print shops I know would not stipulate this profile. Best thing to do is to talk to your printer and find out what specs. they want. Come back and I will try and give you the best info for sending files to the printers as I do this every week at the moment.