I have ID CS4 and Photoshop CS2. This my first book layout. I have some images that were color, I made the black and white in Photoshop, saved as TIFS and imported to ID. I placed them. They look fine on screen, but print terribly to my printer (Samsung CLP-315). Now I can output to a PDF and it prints a nice B&W image.
How do I know what it will look like on the press? Does anyone know why this is happening? How to make it print as good in ID as in the PDF it generates?
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
InDesign does not place files into the document but links to them, same with fonts. So if InDesign doesn't have access to the original images when it is printing it will use a low res version that you see on screen. The screen version looks OKish on screen as monitors are low res compared to a printer.
Now PDFing a document from InDesign before printing is a good thing, one you can look at the PDF and see if their are any problems before printing and it also makes the file platform independent. So can be printer on mac or PC.
Remember when making a PDF check your links are OK and the quality setting in the PDF options are set to Print Quality or better.
Printing directly from InDesign, while possible has always been a little problematic.
ok. I tried changing one of the images to "Embed Link" Then printed straight from in design. It didn't look any better. My images were 300dpi. My laser printer is 600 or 1200 so I bumped it up to 600 and still no change.
These are black and white. For output setting I have tried Composite Gray and Composite RGB (the only two options I have with this printer)
The question for me is how will it look when it goes to press. It looks good coming from the PDF. So should I just assume, since I will submit a high res pdf for publication that it will look good then?
Correct, the PDF then to print is always a good way to go, as mentioned it embeds the images, embeds the fonts so there wont be a problem with missing / incorrect fonts or low res images.
So if the PDF looks fine when viewer at 100% and you did place the images in and only cropped or scaled down they should look fine. Remember up scaling an image in InDesign will reduce the quality of the printed image.
All answers are wrong so far. What is happening is that InDesign is not being able to process the colorspace you placed in your image.
What you MUST do, is convert your image's colorspace from RGB to a compatible CMKY space, like ISO Coated V2, (all printers "language" is CMYK) and then in InDesign choose to export the PDF with this colorspace in the Export Dialog.
Of course, chosing PDF/X-3 or any standard that the company which will publish your document uses.
Dont forget, 300dpi is MORE than enough for ANY type of print job.
Redefining a 300dpi graphic to 600 will help nothing, it will just confuse the shading of colors in the final postscript printer. Do not do this, ever.
You may convert your images to CMYK with Photoshop, in the Menus there is an options "convert to color profile), but first you need to install the color profile in your PC.
And when you save it in Photoshop, make sure you embed the color profile in the image (just check the box of the Color Profile when saving).
Good Luck.
PS> You may download ISO Coated from here: http://www.eci.org/doku.ph
>All answers are wrong so far.
Wow. That's a bold statement given the information we have been given! :-)
Let's back up a few steps...
1) Just what do you mean by 'they print terribly'? Are they jagged/bitmapped low-resolution? Are they blown out with no contrast or too dark? This is the most important information we need in helping you determine what is wrong.
2) How did you convert them to black and white? Exactly what steps did you take?
3) Whereas Fidelix has a point in asking what color space you converted your images to when making them black and white, I disagree with his statement that you MUST convert from RGB to CMYK since you can easily use Grayscale AND if you partner with a good printer they can utilize ICC profiles to convert RGB with often better results than you can get with out of the box Photoshop conversion. Moreover, the desktop printers can often print a reasonably good image regardless of what colorspace your image is in. (there are of course, exceptions, and it is possible that if you are using any color management tools and icc profiles that they might be throwing off your images)
3a) Unless you really understand what you are doing, I highly disagree with Fidelix's assertion that you should embed your color profiles. Color management is complicated stuff and that alone can screw your color up.
4) Your printer is a color printer; the Samsung CLP-315 which appears to use CMYK toner. Have you tried printing the color images as a test? This can help determine if it was something in the color conversion process that you might have inadvertantly done.
5) Although Beng_uk has given some good advice, just because something looks good in PDF format doesn't mean it will actually print good. The bottom line is that you will need to see a good high-resolution contract proof from your printer to see what it will finally look like after you resolve the issues we are discussing.
Anyhow, if you can provide some more information as per the above I am sure we can all contribute to helping you solve these issues.
1.) Yes they are washed out (contrast). The faces look darker than they should. Printing from the PDF has a great contrast. I'm not sure if the Res is a problem or not, but the contrast is.
2.) In PS CS2, the first time, I tried just grayscale. Then I tried the Channel Mixer.
3.) The printer asked me to convert images to grayscale before adding to InDesign.
3.a.) On that line. I am wondering (probably a separate question, but. Can you order Pantone swatches from some place to know what they should really look like on printed medium?
4.) It does have CMYK colors. I haven't tried that yet.
5.) Thank you for your advice. I agree, the proof in this case is in the proof. ;)
1) I don't think resolution is an issue here - what you say leads me to believe it could be an issue of color management and printing. I'd carefully check all of the print dialogue boxes for when you print to the printer directly from ID, when you create the PDF and when you print from the PDF. There may be something in terms of using ICC profiles or a different print driver or the like. (unfortunately, here at work I don't have access to look myself and tell you where to look, but maybe one of the other guys can chime in. You might also check your images themselves and see if they have an output profile attached to them.
2) As long as you are using grayscale, and the images look good in one of your outputs, I don't think we need to worry about them, although when you see the printer's proof, you may decide otherwise.
3a) the printer should be able to show you a swatch book or even give you some samples. You COULD buy your own, but rest assured they are expensive and they don't stay true to color forever, so unless you are going a lot of printing I would lean on your printer to provide them instead of buying your own.
4) Worth a shot but I suspect that if you are having these issues with grayscale you'll see similar issues with CMYK.
Sorry, I meant to answer your last question yesterday but got caught up in work. Basically, I wouldn't use an ICC profile unless you are partnered up with a printer and they help you set up a closed-loop color system. This would entail that they have their presses foot-printed and calibrated, proofs set up to match, and ICC profiles that help capture and define the outside limits of those respective color spaces. They would then help you calibrate your monitor and set up your system (conversion and output profiles) so that when you looked on screen, you would have a pretty good idea of what that color would print like. It would probably be expensive and not worth it unless you are doing a lot of high end work, but if you were doing high end work, it could save you a lot of $$$$
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: SheharyaarSaahilPosted on 2009-09-03 at 01:03:54ID: 25248631
try few things;
make sure that you are saving your TIFF without any compression, i.e. None
Embed your tiff, sometimes InDesign messes up with the linked TIFF files
try printing to another printer, to opt-out the issue of an incompatible driver issue.