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• • April 29, 2014 at 12:13 am #68177
    Kim Larsen

    Member

    Hey,

    Yesterday I got a book back from the printer. It’s a 50 page book, with just about 50 images (color and b/w) in it. ONE of the images got all screwed up … It’s a color photo (CMYK tiff), and two things happend:

    1) A big green semi-transparent box has been placed on top of it. I have no green colors in my document, so I don’t know where THAT came from. About the top 5 mm of the image is NOT green.

    2) The image has been cut down in the middle, and the two halfs has been switched around – so the right half has been placed on the left aso. (I wish I could show a picture of the problem!)

    The document has been made in Indesign cs4, and all images prepared in PS cs4. The PDF was made with a PDF-profile that I downloaded from the printers website.

    Can anyone tell me if I screwed something up??? I have been doing this for a couple of years now, and have never experienced this kind of problem before. Is this an overprinting-thing?

    The printer is still looking into the problem.

  • April 29, 2014 at 12:18 am #68178
    Kim Larsen

    Member

    Btw the book has been printed locally on our small “home printers” several times before shipping of to the professional, and the image always looked fine.

    • April 29, 2014 at 3:31 am #68179
      Theunis De Jong

      Member

      It is a local printer problem; your being able to print it out correctly shows so.

      It is not related to overprinting. Something went wrong in the printers’ RIP software (the program that creates a super-high resolution bitmap of your PDF) while decompressing that particular CMYK image. The usual sequence of “Cyan,Magenta,Yellow,Black” pixels got messed up, and then all went out of sync: the values ended up showing the wrong colors, and parts of your image moved around.

      With the right software, your printer can try to apply another kind of compression on this one image, straight inside your PDF. You can also help (a bit): check what image conversion settings the PDF export uses under “Compression”. If it’s “JPEG”, change to “ZIP”; if it says “ZIP” then change it to JPEG and set the quality to “Maximum”.

      You don’t have to do anything to your original image! When exporting to PDF, InDesign is going to convert and store your image as it says in the Export dialog, regardless of how you saved it from Photoshop.

      Export just this one page — if your printers’ software is not up to specs, flaky, or otherwise contains Bugs of the Unexpected Kind, you might ‘destroy’ other images that were printed correctly before.

  • April 29, 2014 at 4:20 am #68180
    Kim Larsen

    Member

    Hello,

    Thank you for your reply. Yes, I’m leaning towards this being a RIP-error too.

    I have been talking back and forth with the printer-service, and they say two things: “they don’t know what the problem is, and that it’s my fault.”

    If this is in any way MY fault, that’s okay. I’m willing to learn, so that this dosen’t happen again. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what I could have done wrong – and how I’m going to make sure this dosen’t happen again.

    As I mentioned, I have used the printers own export-settings (which I downloaded from their site), and in the PDF settings images compression is being set to “Automatic (JPEG)” and “maximum”.

    .

    ( PS: When I say “printer” I don’t mean that piece of hardware I have placed under my table, but the COMPANY that has printed my book. ;-) )

    • April 29, 2014 at 4:57 am #68181
      Theunis De Jong

      Member

      Yeah, we need a new term for either the machine or the person/firm :) “Pressman” could do: “a person who operates or has charge of a printing press” (that is, if the ladies don’t mind — “pressperson” is rather stretching p.c. usage (that is, “Politically Correct” — not the piece of hardware under my desk)).

      Funny how they say it’s *your* fault that *they* don’t know what the problem is! I guess their stance is, “we supply this preset to everyone and so you must be causing the error somehow”. Unfortunately, my office has found itself in that position as well: a client delivers a ready-for-press PDF, except that it contains stuff known to cause errors — e.g., ‘grayscale’ images that are included as RGB or CMYK. When asked to change it in their PDF, they don’t know how to change it or flat out claim the file is okay (“because I am seeing grayscale”).

      Some gentle to-and-fro communication may do wonders. If your printer is paying attention to your problem, it not only helps *you* but *them* as well. Let them try a sample page with the other settings.

      One more thing I’d like to ask. Is the resolution of this one image pretty nigh on correct? Is it not way too large (or small :P), with some ridiculous scaling applied in InDesign? Are there *reasonable* Downscale At values in the printer profile? (I suspect there are.) Is the box “Crop Image Data To Frame” checked or unchecked? (Grasping at straws here, but you never know. I *have* seen a printer error creep in because of that, and toggling it magically fixed it.)

  • April 29, 2014 at 5:13 am #68185
    Kim Larsen

    Member

    The image is: Actual ppi = 400 , Effective ppi = 398 , Scale = 100,5%
    “Crop Image Data To Frame” is checked.

    The error:
    https://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f292/udgang99/fejl1.jpg

    How it’s suppose to look:
    https://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f292/udgang99/fejl2.jpg

  • April 29, 2014 at 6:04 am #68187
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Wow, that is a bad error! I agree with Jongware that this is a RIP error, not you. But I will ask: Does the PDF look correct in Acrobat? Does it look correct when they open it in Acrobat? If so, and if they are printing from the PDF, then it is definitely their error because “the pdf is the proof.” They should match that, yes?

  • April 29, 2014 at 6:14 am #68188
    Kim Larsen

    Member

    I have checked it in Acrobat 9, and it looks perfect there.

    NOW the printing company is claiming that the PDF looked like that, with the green box, in the PDF they recieved from me – before ripping.

    In order for me to give them the PDF, I have to use their own locally uploading-service whice is a direct part of their website – so no FTP-uploading. Could the PDF have become damage in this upload?

  • April 29, 2014 at 6:19 am #68189
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    it is possible, but unlikely. If it were me, I would make them prove that your PDF looks like this in their version of Acrobat. I have a hard time believing it. (If they are using something that is not Adobe Acrobat, I would be worried.)

    It is definitely possible that the image is corrupted or the PDF is the problem. But this seems very unusual.

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