Export to PDF changes colors to a darker shade

Strange. Could you give some more information about the bitmap? Is it only one or does it happen with all bitmaps? Is it a .bmp or .tif or some other format? Do you have any way of checking the colour space of the bitmap (rgb, lab, cmyk)?

If you print the bitmap to pdf from Preview, do you get the same result?

I can reproduce it with your files.

However, it looks good if I print to pdf/x or if I produce the pdf with Adobe Acrobat Pro.

I cannot tell why it gets wrong with the standard print to PDF, but it is something in that color profile that confuses things.

What about print to pdf/x for you? Does it work?

Yes, export using Adobe Acrobat is simply another printer in the printer menu.

If you have a lot of spare money, you can certainly buy Adobe Acrobat to experiment with, but it should not be needed. MacOS X's print to PDF/X is reasonably good, and it will hopefully improve even more with MacOS X 10.5, which will come within the next few months. There are even things which work better with MacOS X than with Adobe Acrobat. I once tried asking in the Adobe Acrobat support forums why one would use it instead of MacOS X for print to PDF, and no one had any good reply.

Even if you have some spare money and want to experiment, you probably do not need Adobe Acrobat Pro. Adobe Acrobat Standard handles print to PDF in the same way as the Pro version, as far as I know. (I'm confused there. I have access to AA Standard 8.0 for Windows and AA Pro 7.0 for Mac, and I never know which functionality is in which product.)

If you really want to spend a lot of money, you should probably have a look at Adobe CS2.

I'm not at my Mac right now, so I cannot check, but I'm surprised you get the rectangle around the shadow. I thought that was fixed. Someone else may have the shadow story clearer.

Bug reports are made at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/ , but it may be enough if you just enter the observation on the Pages feedback page at http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html .

You also have the option to play with your own color profiles in ColorSync Utility. It is not straightforward, but it is interesting to see what flexibility MacOS X gives us.

CS2 is Adobe Creative Suite. It includes Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop and so on. It is much better at following industry standards than Pages, but it is not as easy to use. And it costs more than ten times as much.

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4)

I opened your PDF file and did a quick pre-flight on it. It is a transparency issue. You are also using different profiles and a different rendering intent on the graphic than in the green boxes. When I removed the transparency from the page, the colours shifted dramatically. As well your graphic is only 136 DPI and using a different ICC profile than the green boxes (which are using Generic RGB profile). To start with, remove the transparancy and flatten the image before combining the two various elements in your layout program. The make sure you tag each external element with the same profile you are using in your layout. When you print to PDF, go into the Advanced menu and make sure your colour management has been turned on. Also, have you set up your Apple CMS using Color Sync Utility yet?

Distiller is basically the engine that creates PDF files outside the Mac OS environment. In the past it was mainly used to create PDF's from .PS and .eps files. It is much more robust (buzz word #1) than the PDF's created from OS X and gives lots more control and literally hundreds of options. The advanced menu I mentioned earlier can be found in Acrobat Distiller settings when you create a settings file. I'm glad Acrobat 8 is fixing your problems. As far as removing transparancies before hand, I don't think that is necessary, but the sample you provided had a tranmsparent object and it's bounding box surrounding all the RGB green boxes. Perhaps your image had a huge bounding box around the object itself. You can avoid this by cropping your photoshop graphic down to a few points outside the image, this way, transparancies are only affecting images intersecting the graphic itself.

Personally I don't think this was a pages issue, but more an issue with a poor quality and poorly created image. (not your fault)