Comments on: Converting CMYK to RGB with InDesign

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:29:57 +0000

Yes, this is an annoying oversight… you should definitely be able to export grayscale PDFs from InDesign. I’ve let Adobe know my feelings on this. Here’s more on the topic:
http://indesignsecrets.com/grayscale-pdf-from-a-color-layout.php
(See the comments afterward; Acrobat is certainly a better method than the kind of crazy technique we talk about in the article.)

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:06:35 +0000

Yea.. I just found out yesterday how to convert the PDF file to greyscale in Acrobat in the Preflight controls. Pain in the ass but I guess that’s what I got to do. My problem is that our Creo rip doesn’t support OSX Lion so I can’t send files as greyscale anymore from InDesign to the rip. So, I have to PDF the file, greyscale it in Acrobat then send it to the rip.

By: Rhiannon

Rhiannon — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:41:27 +0000

Chris: Annoyingly, InDesign doesn’t seem to do greyscale PDFs at all. Even if you have greyscale colour profiles set up, they don’t appear in the list on the ‘Output’ tab of the export dialog. Best you can do is CMYK using only the K channel. This has caused me great problems producing PDFs for certain low-end printers that print rich black unless the PDF is in a true greyscale mode.

The workaround is to convert the colours in Acrobat once you’ve made the PDF.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:37:36 +0000

Thanks for the info on saving a PDF in RGB mode. That’s going to help. How about saving a PDF in greyscale mode? I didn’t see that on the destination list.

By: John Goldsmid

John Goldsmid — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:40:46 +0000

If you export your document to repro quality PDF (File > Adobe PDF Presets > Press Quality), any RGB colours will be converted to CMYK automatically during the PDFing process. The only exception is RGB spot colours (!), which you can fix using ‘Ink Manager’ in the Swatches palette mini-menu thingy (‘Convert spots to process’).
If you want to see how your document will look after PDFing, make sure you have View > Proof Colours turned on – and it will display your document as it will look when output to a CMYK device.

By: scott

scott — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:54:02 +0000

What about in reverse? My publisher wants all RGB colors converted to CMYK. An easy, quick way to do it would be MOST appreciated, as the document is nearly complete. Is there such a thing?

By: Rantingman

Rantingman — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:53:51 +0000

Reading through this discussion, and many others like it, you realis(z)e that the day the colo(u)r management bandwagon started rolling was the day we were all sunk without trace. If you specify a colo(u)r to be 14% cyan or #e2f3fb, that’s the colo(u)r you want. Rather than building a software industry that makes 20,000 on-the-fly fixes around the workflow that quite obviously no-one understands (see discussion above for apparent examples of mixing chalk with water to make oily cheese), focus on inventing devices that reproduce absolute values absolutely correctly. Work to the benchmark, don’t wear benchmark modification goggles to suit the dodgy kit. If you think my comments betray my ignorance of this topic – you’re damned right! It’s a nightmare. So where’s the manual? There’s great advice here by the way – thanks!!!!

By: Terrence

Terrence — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:33:04 +0000

I’m a bit confused about this srgb/adobe rgb thing…
I usually work on InDesign files for a magazine, but for this job, I am just helping the client by recommending a printer – they will provide the PDF files for print.

The issue is that their photographer just asked us whether we use sRGB or Adobe 1998 color space. He seems to lean (rather smugly) towards Adobe 1998. Isn’t this a question for whoever creates the InDesign files? Or should this question be answered by the printer?

BTW, we did ask one rather large printer we use and he seemed oblivious to the whole rgb issue and just mentioned that he needed CYMK PDFs.

By: Branislav Milic

Branislav Milic — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:14:30 +0000

Darren

If you want to limit the ink cover to 300%, you should not use US profiles for projetcs intended to European printers. Use ISO ECI profiles, they cover 330, 320, 300 and 270 %.

http://www.eci.org/doku.php?id=en:downloads then go to ICC profiles.

By: Darren Ketteringham

Darren Ketteringham — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:06:41 +0000

@Roland,

For my purposes, I find that the European preset is wrong for most printers I’ve dealt with in the UK and the EU. The European CMYK settings give a maximum ink density of 350% which most printers will baulk at. I’m regularly checking other people’s artwork and changing rich blacks to a more sensible level.

I think the European preset is optimistic. What I’d like to do is find a reliable way of converting from one CMYK mode to another that actually works. What I do now is make high-res PDFs and convert colours to RGB and then to US SWOP to eradicate the FOGRA profile.

My default Colo(u)r management settings are US Pre-Press (SWOP) which gives max ink density of 300% for everything in the creative Suite except InDesign, where I change the RGB space to sRGB like David suggests. I find this works very well and is great for making screen-only PDFs for proofing etc.