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• • December 3, 2016 at 9:52 am #90266
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I have a 220 book layout that I’m trying to export to PDF to be delivered to the printer.
    The book has some black and white images that I prepared using Photoshop. Some have transparencies.
    When I export a PDF from InDesign with no flattening, it looks exactly like I want it to. However, when I deliver it to the printer, the resulting digital proof has all kinds of problem that seem to arise when the printer auto-flattens the document.
    So now I’m trying to flatten it myself before delivering it to the printer.

    In the PDF export window, I have compatibility set to Acrobat 4. And under the advanced > transparency flattener, I have the preset set to High Resolution.
    The resulting PDF is better than the one generated by the printer, but it still has a lot of problems.

    Black boxes appear in random places:
    Before: https://postimg.org/image/8lo2ihfab/
    After: https://postimg.org/image/52h2ge47t/

    Some things take on an almost inverted look:
    Before: https://s16.postimg.org/9k50kfl2d/Screen_Shot_2016_12_01_at_11_54_25_AM.png
    After: https://s18.postimg.org/e1f3wb5k9/Screen_Shot_2016_12_01_at_11_54_34_AM.png

    Empty areas of image frames turn black:
    Before: https://s13.postimg.org/s8rfida8n/Screen_Shot_2016_12_01_at_11_55_25_AM.png
    After: https://s13.postimg.org/tla9wv3s7/Screen_Shot_2016_12_01_at_11_55_48_AM.png

    Also areas of images where I had partially erased details in Photoshop become completely visible again.

    I just want a printable PDF that looks like the way I laid it out!

    Any advice?

  • December 5, 2016 at 5:24 pm #90305
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    wow, that is incredibly bizarre. What kind of file format did you use to save the images? Are they saved as PSD files? Or TIFF? or something else?

    Are you viewing the exported PDF with Adobe Acrobat, or some other pdf viewer?

  • December 6, 2016 at 2:05 am #90309
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    Wow indeed – as well as what David has said:
    Have you tried outputting to pdfx1a:2001?
    It is the pdf setting alot of publishers base their output on.

  • December 9, 2016 at 1:00 pm #90409
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thank you both for the replies!

    Most of the images are PSDs. There are also some PNGs.

    Looks like I was using Apple Preview to open the PDF, which is evidently the default on my MacBook. I assume Acrobat’s better, but it didn’t occur to me that that could be the source of the problem until you mentioned something. I then tried it with a different program, and didn’t get the same problems.

    So I went ahead and ordered a physical proof from the printer. Hopefully the errors I saw are only in Apple Preview.
    If they persist, I will definitely try pdfx1a:2001.

    Thank you!!

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