InDesign Color Management

Stop settling for mediocre color, and see how a few easy techniques can improve your colors immensely

Color is tricky. Of course, it’s easy to make a color in InDesign and apply it to an object on your page, but to ensure that the color looks the same way on your screen and other people’s screens, and when you print it out… that’s tricky. And that, in a nutshell, is what color management is all about. Color management has a bad reputation as being too complex and technical, something that would require years of study to understand. And the result is that too many designers (especially InDesign users!) just ignore the topic entirely and resign themselves to complaining about color infidelity, rather than actually doing something about it. But in reality, things aren’t quite so daunting. You can get much better color by learning just a little bit about color management. So in this article, I’m not going to be comprehensive about how to get perfect color, because that would take hundreds of pages. Instead, I’m going to focus on the basics, and the most important things you need to know about color management. I promise, this won’t hurt a bit.

Why We Need to Manage Colors

First, it’s important to understand why color management is necessary. As you know, just because I pick a red on my screen doesn’t mean you’re going to see that same red on your screen, and that red will probably look even more different when it comes out on a printer. There are many reasons for this, but the simplest explanation is that different devices just display color differently. Some screens will be brighter, others may have a slightly greener tint to them, some more blue. Same thing with printers: the toner or ink

in your desktop printer is CMYK, but it’s almost certainly a different CMYK than the inks on a big printing press, and those are different than the inks used for fabric printing or screen printing, and so on. And even if the inks are the same, they look really different depending on what you’re printing on. Printing colors on bright white coated paper looks very different than printing on dull, porous newsprint, right? So when you’re trying to communicate with color, you have two options. You can just give up and say, “there’s no way it’ll ever work, so why even bother trying.” Or you can try to adjust the color, based on where it’s being printed or shown. Like, if you know it’s going to be printed on darker paper, you might make the color a little lighter. If you’re displaying it on a really bright screen, maybe you’d make it a little darker to compensate. This process of changing the color with the intention of maintaining the look of the color is the essence of color management. That change might be as small as temporarily tweaking how an RGB color looks so that it matches both on your screen and someone else’s. Or it might be as big as converting an image’s RGB colors to CMYK. In fact, you may have done RGB to CMYK conversions in the past and didn’t realize that you were doing color management, but you were.

Gamuts and Profiles

No matter how much you spend on the most amazing printer or monitor, you’ll never get something that can display every color that we can see. So whenever we talk about a color device—whether that’s a camera, scanner, screen, desktop printer, or printing press—we need to think about the range of colors it can capture or output. That range of colors is called its gamut. It’s tempting to say that different devices have bigger or smaller gamuts. Like, a lot of people say that an RGB device (like a computer screen) has a “bigger” gamut than a CMYK device (like your desktop printer). But actually, there are colors you can print with CMYK that you probably can’t see on your screen—especially some yellows and darker colors like pure cyan. So it’s more accurate to say that different devices have different shaped gamuts (Figure 1).

A profile—technically, an “ICC profile”—is a file on your computer that describes a gamut of colors. It literally just explains how bright white is, how dark black is, how red the reds can be, what pure cyan looks like, and so on. A profile doesn’t have to describe a particular device—it could also describe what’s called a “color space”—such as sRGB, which isn’t one specific screen that someone has; it’s more like an aggregate, or average of screens. I know this all sounds complicated, but the key idea boils down to this: color management can only work if you have profiles that describe all the ways you’re creating color: Document profiles describe how color is defined inside your documents—your photographs, graphics, and InDesign files. Monitor profiles describe how your screen displays colors. Output profiles describe how colors appear on your output devices. (Actually, if you think about it, screens “output” color—they display colors that you see—so monitor profiles are basically output profiles, too.) So your document profiles tell InDesign (or Photoshop or Illustrator) what the colors look like in your documents. Your monitor profile tells it what colors look like on your screen. And the output or destination profiles tell InDesign how colors will look on those output devices. And it’s only then, once you have all of those pieces in place, that InDesign can successfully do color management, converting colors on the fly so you get consistent and more accurate color everywhere your documents appear.

Getting great output profiles

Now that you know it’s important to have high-quality profiles, where should you get them? Fortunately, InDesign and Photoshop ship with a bunch of “generic” profiles you can use (Figure 2).

But there’s one profile that you have to create yourself: your monitor profile. Your screen is yours; it’s your view into your images and documents, and it’s like a fingerprint—you need a custom profile that describes just your screen. (And yes, if you work with two monitors, you need two custom profiles, even if they’re the same brand and model.) To create a custom monitor profile, you’ll need to use a hardware device such as the DataColor Spyder or the i1Display Pro (see Claudia McCue’s review in issue 85). Basically you plug it in, put it on your screen, run the software, and five minutes later you’re done and the Adobe apps will all start using your new monitor profile automatically. These cost about $150, but you simply cannot trust the colors on your screen unless you use one. Tip: Once you run the monitor profiling software, you want to avoid changing your monitor or lighting conditions. For example, if you bump up the brightness on your screen ten minutes after profiling it… well, you’ve changed how colors appear, right? So the profile is no longer accurate. In addition to a monitor profile, you also need output profiles (sometimes called “destination” or “target” profiles). For example, if you’re printing on an inkjet printer, you need a profile for that particular printer. And it’s not just the printer: a good profile has to include both the particular inks you’re using and the paper you’re printing on—because paper and ink affect color! A particular ink printed on uncoated, slightly off-white paper is going to look different printed on ultra-glossy, bright white photo paper. So you need a different profile for every different output you’re using. Many desktop printers come with a set of generic (or “canned”) profiles; if not, you can often find them on the manufacturer’s website (Figure 3). Specialty ink manufacturers also often have downloadable canned profiles for their inks. Commercial printers can sometimes supply you with a profile if you ask them. (If you’re going to be printing your magazine with them for the next year, then they’ll often create a custom profile for you, based on your paper stock and so on.) But if you don’t know what printer you’re using, or maybe even what kind of printing press or paper you’re printing on, you want to use a profile that is based on a standard target. For example, if you’re in North America, you’ve likely been unwittingly using a standard profile called U.S. Web Coated SWOP. Unfortunately, this is a very mediocre standard, and you can almost certainly achieve better color just by using a different output target. For example, the Uncoated FOGRA29 profile is an excellent standard for uncoated papers printed on a normal sheetfed press; or if you’re printing on coated stock, like matte or glossy paper, then perhaps use either the Coated GRACol profile or the Coated FOGRA39 profile. (They’re so similar that it doesn’t really matter which you use, but FOGRA is used more in Europe and Asia.) InDesign ships with all the important standard output targets you’re likely to need, though you can find more specialized ones on the web (search for “ICC profiles”).

Understanding document profiles

Document profiles are incredibly important because they describe what the colors in your documents—your placed Photoshop images and Illustrator graphics, and all the color swatches in InDesign—actually look like. That is, if I define a color swatch in InDesign as 100% cyan, then which cyan ink am I talking about? Remember that different physical cyan inks look different (and look nothing like pure RGB cyan), so the document profile explains what color I’m talking about in this InDesign document. Without a profile, it’s just a number; it has no definitive meaning. You should never use a monitor profile (or a camera profile) as a document profile, though you might use an output profile. For example, a CMYK image in Photoshop might include a document profile that says “the CMYK colors in this file are based on Uncoated FOGRA29.”  Without that information, InDesign wouldn’t know what the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black colors are supposed to look like, so it wouldn’t be able to display them properly on screen. So part of your job is to track which document profiles you’re using in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Fortunately, you rarely need to get document profiles outside the ones Adobe installed for you. For RGB images, you’ll usually want to use the sRGB or Adobe RGB profiles; for CMYK images, you’ll want to use a document profile that best matches your target printed output. (If you don’t know what your target printed output will be, then don’t convert it to CMYK yet; instead, leave it in RGB. See the article that Claudia McCue and I wrote here.)

Setting up InDesign

Every InDesign document has its own document profile—actually, technically it has two profiles: one for RGB and one for CMYK. (This is because InDesign, unlike Illustrator or Photoshop, can handle both CMYK and RGB images and color swatches at the same time.) Unfortunately, InDesign doesn’t make it obvious what those profiles are. The three main approaches for managing profiles all live at the bottom of the Edit menu: Color Settings. In InDesign, Color Settings are your preferences, or defaults, for new documents you create after you click OK. This is a key point: changing Color Settings won’t affect any documents you’ve already made, including the one you currently have open. Typically, the only thing you need to change here is the Settings pop-up menu. I recommend you use the Europe General Purpose 3 preset, because it uses the Coated FOGRA39 CMYK profile, which, as I mentioned earlier, is better than SWOP if you’re printing on a normal sheetfed or digital press (Figure 4). (To choose that setting, you may need to turn on the Advanced checkbox.) This setting also uses the sRGB profile for your RGB colors; I explain why this makes sense in InDesign in this article on InDesignSecrets.

Convert to Profile. I use this feature a lot because it’s the easiest way to discover what the current document’s profiles actually are (Figure 5). However, I almost always click Cancel in this dialog box. My point is, it’s very rare that you’d actually ever make a change to anything in this dialog box, because Convert to Profile actually edits the color definitions of your document’s color swatches to maintain the look of the current colors. And while that’s a good thing to do in Photoshop—for example, Convert to Profile is what I recommend if you want to convert images from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop—it’s usually a terrible idea in InDesign. Assign Profiles. This feature lets you swap out one document profile with another, redefining how the RGB and CMYK colors look in your document (Figure 6). Changing the document profiles with Assign Profiles is like saying,  “The colors in this document now mean something else, because cyan now looks like this, magenta looks like this, and so on.” So the actual color definitions of your color swatches are still 100% cyan, 100% magenta, and so on, but they appear different on screen. Document profiles are also sometimes called “color workspaces” or “working spaces,” but whatever you call them, the important thing is that they define how InDesign thinks about your color—literally how the colors look in your document. For example, if I make a 100% cyan swatch in InDesign, it will appear on screen however 100% cyan is defined in the InDesign document’s CMYK profile. If I use Assign Profile to change from one CMYK profile to another—say, from Coated FOGRA39 to Uncoated FOGRA29—that 100% cyan color will change on screen, too, because cyan looks different on coated and uncoated paper. All the colors you apply to objects in InDesign (both named swatches and unnamed colors) get their appearance from the RGB and CMYK document profile. As we’ll see shortly, the InDesign document profiles are sometimes also applied to imported images, which is where things can get confusing.

Why Colors Change Unexpectedly

When you start paying attention to color management, you’ll notice that sometimes the colors that Illustrator or Photoshop shows you don’t match what InDesign displays. Here’s how to track down the cause of that problem. First, if your image’s profiles don’t match your InDesign document profiles, colors may shift unexpectedly. For example, if you have a CMYK document in Illustrator set to the SWOP profile, and your InDesign document is using Coated FOGRA39, then the same color swatch in the two programs will look different. Again, that’s because each profile gives the color meaning. Second, let’s say you save your CMYK Illustrator or Photoshop document, and you save it with the profile embedded in the file. Then you place that CMYK file into InDesign. You might think that InDesign would read that embedded profile and adjust the colors so that it looks correct in InDesign. After all, that is the whole point of color management! But here’s the ugly truth: by default, InDesign ignores all CMYK document profiles in your placed images and graphics. That’s why you’ll usually get the same color in a CMYK image whether or not you clicked Embed ICC profile when you saved the file. While that sounds weird, for technical reasons it turns out that in most cases it actually is better for InDesign to ignore color management in CMYK files. The result is that if you place a CMYK image into your document, then InDesign displays that CMYK image based on the InDesign document’s CMYK profile (not the image’s). And when it comes time to print or export a PDF, it simply passes along the CMYK values. That way, the CMYK percentages in each color stay what they should be—a 100% black stays 100% black in the final output and doesn’t get converted into a 4-color rich black, and so on. RGB images are different: all RGB images—whether from Photoshop or Illustrator—are color managed. If the placed RGB image does not have an embedded profile, then InDesign uses your InDesign document’s RGB profile. If the image does contain an embedded profile, then InDesign honors it and adjusts its color appropriately. Tip: When you’re building a graphic in Illustrator, you need to decide which is more important to you: the actual color values or the way they look. If you’re creating graphics for a print job, and you care about the specific CMYK values—for example, if you’re using solid colors in icons—you’ll want to use the CMYK document mode in Illustrator. But if you’re making artwork mostly for onscreen viewing, or you use Illustrator for fine art, with a lot of fancy brushes and gradient meshes, and maintaining the look of the colors is more important than the actual values—then the RGB document mode may be the better choice. Because, again, while InDesign doesn’t color manage CMYK documents from Illustrator, it does manage them if they’re set to RGB.

Forcing InDesign to Notice a Profile

There is an important exception to the “InDesign doesn’t color manage CMYK images” rule: you can force it to honor an embedded document profile in a CMYK image from Photoshop. There are two ways to do this. On import: When placing a Photoshop (or any other bitmapped) image, you can enable the Show Import Options checkbox in the Place dialog box. Then, on the Color tab of the Import Options dialog box, you’ll see a pop-up menu called Profile (Figure 7).

After import: If you’ve already placed the image, you can choose Object > Image Color Settings. This brings up the same options, including the Profile pop-up menu. Normally, the Profile pop-up menu is set to Use Document Default, which means “ignore the profile inside the image and use the InDesign document profile instead.” But if you click the pop-up menu and scroll up slightly, you’ll see there’s a profile listed above Use Document Default—and that is the embedded profile. (If there is no profile there, then the file doesn’t contain one.) Unfortunately, these features work only with bitmapped images. You can’t control vector graphics, such as Illustrator graphics. So, as I said earlier, if you want to color manage an Illustrator graphic, it needs to be saved in RGB mode. (Also there’s currently a frustrating bug in InDesign, where if you tell it to honor an embedded profile, and then you duplicate the image (with copy and paste, or cut and paste, or even Option/Alt-drag), then the duplicate is no longer color managed. You have to go back to Image Color Settings and choose the profile again.) I want to be clear here that color managing CMYK images should be the exception, not the rule. In most cases, if you’re converting to CMYK in Photoshop, then you should be converting to the same profile that you’re using in InDesign. And when the two profiles match, you don’t need to embed the profile in the Photoshop document, and you certainly don’t need to set that profile in InDesign. But in the rare situation where you receive a photo that someone else created, and they saved it in CMYK using a particular profile, and you know they want you to use that profile, and it’s different than the one you’re using… well, okay, in that situation, you can use Image Color Settings to choose the profile, and the CMYK values will get color managed to get more consistent, accurate color for that one image.

Converting RGB to CMYK in Photoshop

As I said, you should not convert your images to CMYK in Photoshop unless you have a really good reason to do so. Instead, place them as RGB into InDesign. However, a lot of people do want to convert images in Photoshop, so I offer this one warning: if you’re going to convert to CMYK, don’t do it by choosing Image > Mode > CMYK. Technically, it’ll work, but there’s a critical problem here: which CMYK? There are lots of different RGBs and lots of different CMYKs. Should it be the CMYK for your desktop inkjet printer? Or the CMYK of your printing press? And if it’s your printing press, then which ink and paper are you using? Because, again, CMYK looks different with different output conditions. Using Photoshop’s Edit > Convert to Profile feature is the far better option, because it gives you the control you need (Figure 8).

Soft (on screen) proofing

Soft-proofing is proofing your colors on screen, so that you’ll get a better sense for how colors will appear in print. InDesign offers several good soft-proofing features: Overprint Preview. When you choose View > Overprint Preview, InDesign turns on High Quality Display—so all your images and vector graphics look as good as they can—and shows where one color is going to print on top of another. Appearance of Black. Inside InDesign’s Preferences dialog box, the Appearance of Black pane lets you tell InDesign how you want black to look on screen and on desktop printers. By default, this is set to show Rich Black, which means make it as black as it can be. But in reality, black ink isn’t really that black; it’s more like dark charcoal gray. So I recommend changing these pop-up menus to Accurately instead. Setting this preference can be a bit of a downer, because your images probably won’t look as good onscreen. But you want to know the truth of what they’ll look like in print, right? Better to set expectations early on than to feel let down when the final product lands in your hands. Proof Colors. The most important soft proofing feature is View > Proof Setup > Custom, which opens the scary-sounding Customize Proof Condition dialog box (Figure 9).

From here you can choose any color profile you have installed. In general, you’ll choose a device or a standard target profile such as Uncoated FOGRA29. You can also enable Simulate Paper White, which tells InDesign to set the whitest white in your document to the whitest white in the output profile. And because paper is never as white as your bright white screen, when you click OK, your document will probably appear darker and more muted. However, if your monitor is calibrated and profiled correctly, then you’ll get more accurate color all around. It may help if you look away from the screen while you click OK. That way you won’t see the instant color shift and your brain might not struggle as much to accept the new “white.” Soft proofing like this only works when you’re in a neutral environment. That means your office lighting should be relatively low and consistent and your walls should be a neutral gray. The colors around you affect how you see colors (even the shirt you’re wearing has an impact), so even if the monitor is showing you the color accurately, you might not be experiencing it the same if the environment changes. Ultimately, you’ll never get an exact match between seeing something on screen and seeing it on paper. But the key is not in getting a perfect match, but rather in getting close, and then learning the relationship between your screen and your final printed piece. When you do that, then soft proofing can give you a very accurate rendition of how your pages will appear when they come off press.

Printing from InDesign

If you’re sending your document to a commercial printer, and they’re printing to a digital or offset press, then you’ll probably want to send them a PDF of your file and let them print from Acrobat. (I’ll talk about PDFs in the next section.) If you’re printing directly from InDesign, you’re probably making a flyer or poster for your school or work or something where you just want to get the best possible output from your desktop printer. The sad truth is that while technically you should be able to color manage your InDesign documents to a desktop printer, it actually turns out to be somewhere between difficult and impossible. The best option, in my experience, is usually to set the Color pop-up menu (in the Output pane of the Print dialog box) to Composite RGB, and then switch to the Color Management pane and set the Printer Profile pop-up menu to sRGB (Figure 10).

I hate this, because it shouldn’t work as well as using CMYK and choosing a proper output profile, but most desktop printers (like laser printers or inkjet printers that almost everyone has) actually seem to work best when you treat them like sRGB devices in InDesign’s Print dialog box. But then, you should specify which profile to use with the printer driver dialog box. Remember that when you print from InDesign, the program does its color management and then hands the file off to the printer driver. The printer driver is another piece of software on your computer, and it actually sends your file to the printer—but not before it does its own color management on it! So, while you’re in the Print dialog box, click the button labeled Printer (Mac OS) or Setup (Windows) to open the printer driver dialog box (Figure 11). Then look around to figure out how to control your printer’s color management settings, including what kind of paper stock you’re printing on. Keep in mind that different printers have totally different controls. Then you can click Print, which takes you back to InDesign’s Print dialog box to finish printing the file. Note: While this works great for most desktop printers, some (notably higher-end printers and some PostScript laser printers) do output better color when you send them Composite CMYK and choose a proper printer color profile in the Color Management pane. You’ll just have to test it on your printer to see if that results in better color for you. If you do this, though, be sure to open the printer driver dialog box and turn off any color management or color correction settings there—otherwise, the printer driver will “double-color-manage” your file.

Exporting Color Managed PDF Files 

The whole point of color management is clear communication—like communicating colors accurately from your document to the screen, or from your screen to your desktop printer. But perhaps the most important communication is between you and your commercial printer—the company that is printing your document for you. And by far the best way to send your document to them is by making a PDF of it. Here, I’m going to focus on just one aspect of making a PDF: how to manage your colors. If you export an interactive PDF file, InDesign will automatically convert all your colors to sRGB—which makes sense, because the whole point of sRGB is that it more or less describes the color of a typical screen. But when creating a print PDF, you need to tell InDesign exactly what to do with your color. You do all of this in the Output pane of the PDF dialog box (Figure 12).

The first thing you want to do is choose a PDF preset at the top of the dialog box. In general, I recommend you use PDF/X-1a, X-3, or X-4. The main differences between these PDF/X standards have to do with transparency effects and color management. So for example, PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 both use the Acrobat 4 standard, which means all transparency gets flattened when you export the file. That’s different than PDF/X-4, which maintains your transparency effects and lets your printer flatten the file. But PDF/X-1a only supports CMYK colors (plus spot colors), so in PDF/X-1a, all your RGB images get converted to CMYK. In X-3 and X-4, InDesign saves your RGB images as RGB, so it becomes the responsibility of your printer to do the RGB-to-CMYK conversion. Ultimately, I would almost always rather my printer do the flattening and color conversions, because they know their equipment and output conditions way better than I do—so I really prefer PDF/X-4. Unfortunately, lots of old-school printers still insist on PDF/X-1a, where you’re responsible for the color. (Also, if you’re making a PDF of, say, an ad, and you’re sending it to a magazine, then you’re not going to know what their printer wants, right? So then you might want to go for PDF/X-1a, because pretty much everyone will accept that.) When you choose PDF/X-1a, InDesign changes the Color Conversion pop-up menu to Convert to Destination (Preserve Numbers), which means if you’ve placed RGB images or even used RGB color swatches, they’ll get converted to CMYK. But you can specify which CMYK in the Destination pop-up menu. By default it will use your InDesign document CMYK profile, which might be US Web Coated SWOP (what I like to call “blah” color). You’re sure to get better results if you change that to a better CMYK profile, such as FOGRA29 (for printing on uncoated paper) or FOGR39 or GRACol (for printing on a coated stock). By the way, there is another setting in the Output pane called just “Convert to Destination.” If you choose that, all your CMYK colors may also get converted. That’s bad, because suddenly what was just 100% black text turns into rich black text, with some cyan and magenta mixed in. “Preserve Numbers” means leave the CMYK values alone, which is what you want. Of course, if you have an output profile that better defines your output conditions—like maybe your printer made a custom profile that describes what their ink will look like on the paper you chose—then you can choose it from the Destination pop-up menu. And that’s awesome, because that means you’re converting your RGB images to exactly the right CMYK, and you’re doing it at the right time—in the process of making your PDF. All this changes a little bit when you’re making an X-3 or X-4 PDF. In those presets, the Color Conversion pop-up menu will be set to No Color Conversion. In this case, you cannot choose a color profile from the Destination pop-up menu. However, you can choose a profile from the Output Intent Profile Name pop-up menu. This menu is a way to communicate to your printer what you think the output profile should be. For example, let’s say you used Photoshop to convert half the images in your document to CMYK, using a particular profile, like GRACol. And you’re expecting your print provider to convert the rest of your PDF to the GRACol profile, too. Then you could choose that profile from this menu. It doesn’t change your images at all, but it adds a notation in the PDF stating your intention.

Small Steps with Big Results

I won’t lie to you: color management isn’t usually fun. The stakes are high, the jargon is weird, and often your reward for doing everything right is that colors appear less rich and vibrant than you had hoped for. But if you approach color management like a puzzle or a game, it can be very gratifying. And you can make yourself a very valuable team member by being “the one who understands color management.” Start with the basics: create a monitor profile and set up your apps and documents with the proper document profiles. Then take small steps into using better-quality output profiles. And whenever you see the words RGB or CMYK, think to yourself: which RGB? Which CMYK? After a while, you’ll see that you don’t have to do a lot to achieve much better and more consistent color in your documents.