Tip of the Week: Use RGB PDFs to Avoid Packaging Errors

Sandee Cohen

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This InDesign tip on using RGB PDFs to avoid packaging errors was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on April 13, 2017.

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I take a lot of screenshots which I need to place into InDesign documents.

Because most of that work will be output as PDF for onscreen viewing, I leave the screen shots as RGB. But this causes InDesign to display an alert when I package my file: all the RGB images are flagged as a possible problem.

I finally figured out how to avoid the flagged problems. Instead of saving my screenshots as PSD or TIFF, I save them as PDF.

InDesign doesn’t see an RGB PDF as an RGB document! If you place an RGB file saved as Photoshop PSD, it will not show up as using the RGB color space. Instead, the type of file is simply listed as PDF.

This has become a terrific way for me to avoid unwanted RGB “problems” being flagged in the Package process. It is also something important to remember if you do want to flag RGB files. In those cases, remember that Photoshop PDF documents won’t get flagged during Packaging, but they will be flagged by the Preflight feature when you use a profile that doesn’t allow RGB.