Problem: Bright Green Colors Change when Exporting to PDF

I created 2 shapes in Pages and applied known RGB colors to the round shape and cmyk colors to the Square shape, using the color sliders in the Color Picker

The first thing to understand:

Endusers do not want to create and correct colour in the standard space. Endusers did not want a CIEL a*b D50 2 degree standard observer mode for creating and correcting colour. This is understandable, because CIEL a*b does not correspond to everyday enduser concepts of colour.

One solution to this is creating and correcting colour in CIELch for Lightness, Chroma, Hue which closely corresponds to everyday enduser concepts of colour as in, "Make the colour a little lighter, a little less saturated, and shift the colour a bit towards blue."

When the separation of colours from colourants was discussed at FOGRA Forschungsgesellschaft Druck und Medien in München at a seminar in April 1992, Chief Editor Kurt Wolf insisted that it should be possible to create colour and correct colour in non-CIE modes.

This led to modeless interactivity. It is possible to create a colour and correct a colour in the Profile Connection Space using any colourant model as window, whether RGB colourant or CMYK colourant if and only if the colours formed by the colourants are specified through an ICC profile.

The second thing to understand:

One might argue from the development point of view that if a circle is drawn, the circle is selected, and the selected circle is coloured, then the mode of the colour picker should set the colourant model of the circle and cause a corresponding ICC source profile to be embedded as source.

On this argument, if the Apple Colour Picker is set to CMYK Sliders then the selected object drawn in Apple Pages changes colourant model say from RGB to CMYK and the colour space for creating and correcting the colour becomes the ICC PRTR Printer profile selected in the Apple Colour Picker.

This is how Adobe InDesign works, for instance. The drawback of working this way is that a 1.5Mb LUT-based ICC PRTR Printer profile has to be embedded as source colour space for the fill of the circle because if it is not embedded then the colour to be formed by the colourants is undefined.

Because a page description (it does not matter which in principle) is object-oriented, the fill of a circle could be one source colour space and the stroke of the circle could be another source colour space, causing embedding of two 1.5Mb LUT-based ICC PRTR Printer profiles for one circle.

Apple Pages does not work this way. Apple Colour Picker does not change the colourant model unless you explicitly command that the colourant model be changed. This is in my opinion just as technically correct as Adobe's approach.

1. Create a circle, select the circle, in the Apple Colour Picker select CMYK Sliders, set the stroke to none, and set the fill to some colour.

2. Save to PDF 1.3 without OutputIntent, open in Adobe Acrobat Professional, and use Preflight to determine the embedded source ICC colour space: Generic RGB Profile.

3. Repeat set 1 but select CMYK Sliders, open the Disclose icon to the left of the CMYK Sliders selection menu, and in the drop-down menu select some ICC PRTR Printer profile.

4. Save to PDF 1.3 without OutputIntent and verify that the object has the selected ICC PRTR Printer profile as ICCBased reference.

You can select Device CMYK. If you select Device CMYK then the behaviour should be similar to Adobe applications with Colour Management Off.

That is, inside the application the colour is managed, but the appropriate ICC source colour spaces are not attached when the colourants are saved out of the application.

It's 01:30 and past time for bed -:)

/hh

Henrik,

To be brief, unlike some here 🙂 , most of your suggestions are not visible, not documented and confusing in the extreme to the supposed amateur users of Pages.

To individually set ICC PRTR Printer profile on *each color* and then have +absolutely no feedback on where it is applied+ is total and utter madness.

The end result is that for users the standard result is unusable, except for desktop printers.

But nowhere have they been told that.

Peter

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

I created 2 shapes in Pages and applied known RGB colors to the round shape and cmyk colors to the Square shape, using the color sliders in the Color Picker.

OK. My only explanation is that you failed actually applying the colours. I have had problems with that, when I create a shape, double click on the fill colour in the inspector and then set the colour using the Colors palette. Sometimes, I click on the wrong spot, and the link between the palette and the shape somehow is broken. I can still set colours and colour profiles in the palette, but they are applied to some ghost object that is not visible.

The only way I found to restore the link between the palette and the shape, is to close the palette and double click on the fill colour again.

I don't think so Magnus.

I know what you are saying, I think, that merely creating the color with the object selected does not apply it. Very bad UI design! Doesn't say much for Pages if color has to be applied "correctly" or it fails.

What I did was actually create the accurate swatch then drag applied it to the object which visibly accepted the color. I know it was applied as well by the values on inspecting it in Illustrator.

This is one of my pet hates in the way Pages works that you have to double, triple check nearly everything, because the feedback and connection between settings and objects is so poor.

Peter

Peter,

To individually set ICC PRTR Printer profile on each color and then have absolutely no feedback on where it is applied is total and utter madness.

Please, pay attention -:)

You want one and only one source colour space, if possible. You are getting one and only one source colour space unless you are determined not to. Generic RGB Profile is assigned per object to any object whether Apple Colour Palette > RGB Sliders is set, Apple Colour Palette > CMYK Sliders is set, Apple Colour Palette > HSB Sliders is set or Apple Colour Palette > Gray Sliders is set. If and only if you open the Disclose drop-down menu and specify a source colour space to match the colourant model of the sliders (possible for all modes except HSB since HSB is not a device colourant model), you get different source colour spaces embedded.

To be brief, unlike some here , most of your suggestions are not visible, not documented and confusing in the extreme to the supposed amateur users of Pages.

It is correct that the Apple Colour Palette is undocumented, and if you want to throw in that Apple's technical writers wouldn't know how then I'd have no problem with that. Nor would posters on the Apple ColorSync Users List since their perspective is that of the Adobe product community.

However, it is not correct that the Apple Colour Palette is useless for the naive everyday enduser. Rather, where Adobe implementations try to take advantageg of per object colour management with consequential confusion, the Apple Colour Palette avoids this problem in so far as possible.

The end result is that for users the standard result is unusable, except for desktop printers.

We have gone round and round and round this for a year, and yet I still don't seem to see you writing that you understand the PostScript model and the PDF model to a degree that you are clear that these page descriptions support multiple device colourant models and multiple managed colourant models simultaneously, not what the consequences of this can be if endusers work the way they worked with CEPS scanners saving out EPS DCS, QuarkXPress and PageMaker and Illustrator in the 1980s and 1990s, passing unmanaged CMYK colourant by the numbers through to the raster image processor. It's OK to be critical, but it's tiresome if criticism is not coupled with a concept of what it is one is criticising.

/hh

Henrik,,

What is clear to me is the end result. The .pdf file produced from Pages and every other application that uses the OSX filters.

You keep hedging your bets, conceding the flaws but suggesting they don't stop you producing a commercial print job.

There is also no control over errant resolution, stray inks, crude bitmapping of text, overprinting, overinking, crop marks, bleeds, slugs or anything else that can ruin a print job.

We are all waiting with baited breath for you to detail how to avoid all the problems and produce a commercially printable .pdf file from the soup of material in Pages.

Peter

You keep hedging your bets, conceding the flaws but suggesting they don't stop you producing a commercial print job.

Navigare necesse est.

It is _necessary for portability and repurposing_ to separate characters from glyphs, but one can complain about implementations including Apple's.

It is _necessary for portability and repurposing_ to separate colours from colourants, but one can complain about implementations including Apple's.

There is also no control over errant resolution, stray inks, crude bitmapping of text, overprinting, overinking, crop marks, bleeds, slugs or anything else that can ruin a print job.

The issue is whether Apple is willing to show how to use the Apple Character Palette, the Apple Typography Palette, the Apple Colour Palette, and the Apple ColorSync Utility in podcasts provided to the public and not whether I am or am not willing to do so since I neither control the development nor the management of these products. I am simply drawing a line between reasonable criticism and unreasonable criticism.

/hh

I think this is ultimately the question: How do I export from Pages to PDF in CMYK?

For a photograph in TIFF or JPEG format, open in Apple ColorSync Utility, select ICC PRTR Printer profile for intended printing condition, convert the picture elements (pixels) into those colourants, embed the ICC PRTR Printer profile for the intended printing condition, place the preconverted photograph in Apple Pages, and the colourant model (CMYK) and colour space (the ICC PRTR Printer profile) will stay the same. This is a function of the PDF page description model and the ICC colour management model, and not particularly of Apple Pages.

For an illustration drawn in Apple Pages, select the object fill or stroke, select the disclose icon in the Apple Colour Picker when in CMYK Sliders mode, select the ICC PRTR Printer profile for the intended printing condition, use the sliders to create the intended colour, and when the pagination is saved into a PDF page description the object will reference the ICC PRTR Printer profile you picked since that is saved as source colour space.

What you need to understand is that the above is irrelevant, since you do not want to define input colours in CMYK and certainly not if you are not dead certain of the ICC PRTR Printer profile for the intended printing condition since if it is different from the input source space your colourant combinations will be converted to match the closest possible colours in the destination colour space. There is no benefit to working in CMYK in a colour managed workflow, for a range of reasons including above.

I sent a picture from the document with the green color to a PC and used Paint to change the green color to RGB 0, 200, 0 (instead of 0, 207, 0). I sent it back through gmail, saved, and then dragged the picture from finder back into my document, and matched all the green text to the slightly different green color. I exported.

Apple's system software will embed a source ICC colour space to define the colours, but do you know if Windows Paint will honour a source ICC colour space or will it convert to sRGB without asking you? Further, will Windows Paint embed the ICC colour space that defines the colours to be formed by the colourants you are painting?

I'm ultimately attempting to print these documents using vistaprint. Independent of whether I see the correct color or the incorrect color when I look in Acrobat, I always see the same wrong color when I upload to the Vistaprint template.

This is Brønshøj, some six kilometers from central København. VistaPrint is whatever it is whereever it is, but if VistaPrint is part of the wider professional world then it will communicate colour in the ICC colour management model. If it does not, then I wish you good luck -:)

/hh

Jacob Silvermetz wrote:
Confirmed. It's a simple printing problem. The green color does not exist on a CMYK color scale. There are no deep technical issues at all.

If it is an important document, I would not give up.

Are you sure you want it in CMYK? As far as I understand, there are printers nowadays that can print more colours than CMYK. It is possible that you could give them an RGB version of the doc, with the right colour profiles, and that they will be able to print it correctly.

Bright green cannot be duplicated in CMYK. That's the ultimate problem.

What are you talking about?

CMYK is an accepted technical abbreviation for four component / four channel process colourant. The actual laydown order depends on the printing process, for instance, long run gravure uses a different laydown order than short run offset. There are also plenty of large format photo gamut printers that are addressable in CMYK, but that in the driver convert to CcMmYK and in order to define softer detail sometimes CcMmYKk.

The actual colour space of a printing process that is addressable as CMYK varies HUGELY. Offset on newsprint has a small colour space, smaller than an Apple/Sony cathode ray tube monitor. Offset on semigloss or gloss coated art paper has a colour space that is larger in some areas than the colour space of an Apple/Sony cathode ray tube monitor. When the Apple Cinema Display arrived a heated debate broke out behind the scenes because the colour space was smaller than that of a conventional cathode ray tube. Or if you take a look at the colour space of a photo gamut large format inkjet configured with neutral bright paper, it is so large that it can hold a good deal of colours your display can't.

If you want to begin to understand the difference between the data space (CMYK, RGB ...) and the colour space (in CIE co-ordinates), you would be well advised to spend time in the Apple ColorSync Utility comparing the gamuts of digital colour devices you have in your studio and digital colour devices available at imaging services you wish to use, or barring measured profiles then canned profiles for the general make and model of digital colour device.

Hope this helps.

Henrik

http://www.vistaprint.dk

"Your document should be created in CMYK mode so that the colors that you see on the screen most closely match the final printed product. If you create your document in RGB, the colors in your printed product may vary slightly. Many of the bright values produced by your monitor cannot be reproduced in print."

A Google site search shows 608 hits for "color" but not a single hit for either "ICC" or "profile". It is impossible to follow the above instructions, because there is no information on the site that specifies the colour space that the shop sells.

The ICC profile for the intended printing condition calculates the colourants for the colour appearance on the specific paper, with the specific tone value increase, and with the specific lay down sequence. In technical terms, VistaPrint is non-sense.

/hh