Preparing your file for print can be a daunting task if you don’t have an understanding of how to handle colours in your PDF. Adobe Acrobat makes it fairly easy for you to check the colours in your PDF and convert them to the destination settings that you require for your print job. Take note however, it is Adobe ACROBAT not READER which allows this functionality. The two programs may look very similar in terms of their interface, but Reader is a very limited and scaled-back version of Acrobat, with the sole purpose of allowing users to open and view PDF files but not edit them.

The first step of this process is to check your PDF for what colours are actually being used in the file. As with most things in life, there are a couple of ways to achieve this and I like to do both of these in my file preparation process. The first step is to do an ‘Output Preview’ – which is basically a tool that allows you to see what ‘plates’ would be generated if the document were separated into its individual colours (if you don’t know what I mean when I say “plates”, don’t worry at this stage). To do an output preview, navigate to the ‘Advanced’ menu, then ‘Print Production’ then ‘Output Preview’.

Choose the Output Preview from the Advanced Menu

Once you have the Output Preview open, you should see a palette like this:

The Output Preview Window

Have a look at what colours are displayed in the list of colours in the Output Preview window. Depending on the print task that you are handling, you will want either Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black as the only colours listed, or you will want a certain number of spot colours (which vary according to the job). Let’s say for this particular example you are about to submit a job with AstroPrint. Most of our print jobs are done in process colour (or CMYK) so you will want to convert any colours that appear in this list which are not Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or Black. Looking at my example, I can see that this file is made up of the colours Red, Green and Blue, so I will definitely need to run a conversion on the colours to make it suitable for print. If the list of colours just said Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, or Black, chances are my file would be ok for print, but I would still do this next step of the checking process just to make sure.

The next step we undertake is the running of a ‘Preflight’. You will get to know and love this process as it will pick up so many errors which you would just not have noticed yourself. A preflight is like a scan of your document which detects possible problems that might affect it when going to print. You can run countless different types of checks on your file, but here we will just run one. To access the preflight panel, go to Advanced, Print Production, Preflight. A small window will appear with a list of different checks that you can run. Make sure you click the little magnifying glass icon with a ‘P’ in the centre of it to access the correct preflight options. From this list, choose the ‘Image is not CMYK’ check, and click the ‘Analyze’ button. In the results, you will see an exclamation mark for any issues that appear, as well as a description of the issue.

The preflight window appears

Let’s say for our example, the preflight pointed out that a certain image was still in RGB mode. The this would be further indication to us that out file is not yet ready for print and that we should run a fixup or conversion on the file to make it suitable. This can be done so easily using the same preflight window that we have been using to check the file.

Click on the spanner icon, which will display a list of possible ‘fixups’ which can be applied to the PDF. From this list, you will want to expand the ‘Color spaces, spot colors, inks’ group and choose an appropriate colour conversion for the task at hand. For our example, we want the file to be suitable for offset process printing, so we will choose the ‘Convert Color to U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2″ option, and then click the ‘Fix’ icon in the lower left corner. You may be asked to choose a name and location to save your converted file, so if that is the case, do so and then your file will be converted. After this, your conversion will run and then you can be confident that the colours in your PDF have all been converted to the colour space that you have selected for print purposes, and your file submission to your printer should be a breeze!

Convert the colours

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Written by Dario Paolini
Director – AstroPrint.com.au