InQuestion: Matching Photoshop Colors, Combining Documents, Using Smart Guides

Q. I’ve created a brochure with some color overlay effects, and my client has approved my design, based on what I showed her on my monitor. But now that it’s time to go to the printer, I’m finding that the effect just doesn’t look the same in an exported PDF, and the proof from the printer shows the same problem. How can I fix this? A. Unfortunately, InDesign’s default viewing mode is a bit lazy—it doesn’t faithfully render some blending modes if you’re using spot color content. For example, in Figure 1, spot color shapes are using the Hue blending mode. In Normal view mode, the effect is subtle. But that isn’t the real story; choose View > Overprint Preview, and InDesign buckles down and displays the actual outcome. It’s a bit of a shocker, isn’t it?

What can you do to resolve this? Be aware of this issue, and if you’re getting fancy with spot colors and blending modes, always work with Overprint Preview turned on, or get in the habit of frequently activating it to check your work. But what if you have your heart set on a particular appearance, and the effect just won’t behave? The easiest fix is to convert spot color content to process (CMYK) colors; then you’re likely to achieve the desired look. If you don’t have the option to convert to process, try using a combination of lowered opacity and the Multiply

blending mode. Q. We combine pages from multiple documents in order to build project proposals. Now I’m encountering two problems, and I can’t figure out what’s causing them. First, when I drag a page from one document into another, the page numbers disappear! And if I just copy text from one document into the other, the appearance of the text changes. The text just uses the [Basic Paragraph] style in both documents. What’s going on? A. When you transplant a page, it takes on the corresponding master that’s in effect in the target document. In other words, if the A-Master in the donor document has automatic page numbers, but the A-Master in the target document doesn’t, you lose the page numbers.  The same principle is at work when you copy and paste text between documents. Of course, your donor document and target document both have the default [Basic Paragraph] style, but someone has changed the specifications for that style in one of the documents. When you paste into the target file, the text takes on the specs in that file. This is one reason I’m not a big fan of changing the [Basic Paragraph] style. By the way, this happens regardless of the particular style; if you have a style named Heading in two documents, but the style is defined differently, pasted text will take on the definition of the target document as well. Q. My company is printing promotional brochures for an upcoming trade show. Because we only need a few hundred, they’re going on a digital press. I have an image with a dark blue background, but I need for the background to cover entire pages. I went into Photoshop and used the Eyedropper tool to sample the color, and built a swatch in InDesign with the same values, created a large rectangle, and filled it with that swatch. But in the printed piece you can still see the difference between the image and the InDesign object  (Figure 2). I don’t want to have to create a ginormous image and composite the products together, because the client moves everything around so frequently. How can I make the colors match? A. The RIPs (Raster Image Processors) that process graphics for digital presses seem to apply color management differently to raster content (images and image content generated by effects, such as drop shadows or glows) and vector content. The large flat color rectangle you’re using as a background is a vector shape. If you just needed a glow around your product shots, you could silhouette them in Photoshop, and then apply the glow in InDesign. But you have noise in the gradient background, and there’s really no way to do that in InDesign—you can add noise to the transition area of a gradient, but not inside an object.  For consistency across your page on a digital press, you will need to have all-image content. But don’t panic—this doesn’t mean you have to composite in Photoshop! Here’s the fix: in Photoshop, create a small new image (one inch square is sufficient), and fill it with the correct swatch. In InDesign, change the fill of your background rectangle to None, and then place the small swatch image in that frame. Choose Object > Fitting > Fit Content to Frame. Don’t worry—the swatch image has no detail and no grain, so it doesn’t matter how much you scale it. And because it’s so small, it doesn’t add much to the size of your InDesign file or an exported PDF. Now, the content of your page is all made of the same material, and will provide consistent print output on the digital press. By the way, this issue is particular to digital presses; the RIPs for offset platemakers treat raster and vector content the same. And no, I don’t know why! Q. In previous versions of InDesign, I’d rotate a frame, and then select an adjacent frame and drag on the bounding box, relying on the Smart Guide “echo” in the first frame to help me rotate to the same degree. Now, I can’t seem to get it to work unless I change the Interface option for “Live Screen Drawing” to “Immediate.” Am I missing something, or have Smart Guides gotten dumb? A. Patience, Grasshopper. Really: InDesign seems to prefer that you use what’s long been called Patient Mode to awaken the rotation guide “duckbills.” If you position your cursor just outside a corner of a frame and immediately drag to rotate it, you may not see the familiar green Smart Guide angle indicators (Figure 3). It’s not happening to everyone, but you’re not alone—it’s been happening to me, too, along with the majority of students in a recent class—not seeing those helpful positioning guides. Changing the Live Screen Drawing option (under Preferences > Interface) to Immediate is a fix, but it may slow down your performance, especially if there is large vector artwork in your layout.  Instead, take a deep breath and use Patient Mode. Click and hold down your mouse button for a second before you begin rotating. When the cursor changes to an arrowhead, InDesign is ready to show you a live preview. When you begin rotating, you’ll see the matching green angle marks, confirming that you’ve magically rotated the frame to the same angle as the adjacent frame (Figure 4).