Topic awaiting preservation: inDesign Transparency Problem

Hi All,
I have a problem with indesign, which im not sure is a problem ... I have a color strip down the side of the page, which i am putting transparent images on.

Now everything works fine, looks fine in indesign, but when i print the page on my *desktop printer*... the transparent sections on the images, make that part of the color strip print out a different tone. So while the images look like they are transparent on print out, the colors come out wrong.

I am not sure if this is just because of my printer etc... BUT even when i export to PDF i can notice a slight color difference on the transparent part of the image. Obviously this would be a major problem and im not sure what to do.

I have tried exporting cmyk transparent tif, psd from photoshop, even tried rgb etc. But all the same problem

please help! thanks

I rarely ever use InDesign, frankly I don't even know why I bought the darn thing, it's no use to me!

Seeing as you're not getting any replies here why don't you try the Adobe Community, that's where I used to post my quirks and other problems before I came here. They'll give you an expert opinion on your problem.

Here lie the remains of Templar654's sig... *sniff*
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Yeh ok, seems not many indesign users around here. Howcome you dont use it? what sort of work do u do

Well I mainly do Web Designing but sometimes if I get the job I do Print Media as well not alot of that happening around me though.

I used to work for my school magazine and I was sort of like the Assistant Editor so I had to set the layouts of the articles and stuff, which I made in InDesign, then send it to the big guy who'd approve it... I know I know isn't that his job well I guess he was just too lazy to do it himself!!

I rarely ever get any Print Media offers and schools over so I rarely ever use InDesign although I might just consider that path once more, I got an offer to make a few brouchuers then again I might be using Illustrator alot there.

Here lie the remains of Templar654's sig... *sniff*
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Sorry been busy, Hard to tell what could be wrong, I haven't experanced that partiular issue yet...

My guess would be something related to either color managemnet, or your transparence flattening settings.

Since I mostly use CYMK, So I typically disable color management in indesign, but if you do make sure your color setup matchs those of Photoshop, Ilustrator.

Also make sure you Transparecy blend space matchs the color spaced used in both the images and tint block.

You might also try playing with your Transparency flatting presets perhaps there is an issue there.

The only other thing I can think up is, how are you producing the transparency. Perhaps some density is appearing that is not showing up via the eyedropper and info pallete. I have seen some issues in the past with Photoshop 6 and 7 with "opacity" which I was only able to fix it by creating a selection of the transparancy, then flatting the trasparent layer to a white background filled layer and then redoing the transparenc via the selection.

Another choose, is to use clipping paths and not transparnce. Not always possiable and it is a all or nothing transparancy. But it is the tried and true method for producing images that need to be isoloated from there background in layout application.

Well since I'm no longer very active in the prepress any longer I don't have as much chance to use Indesign or Quark. But having used just about everything on the market I much perfer InDesign CS. Quark is nice but they realy need to stop and take a long hard look that the market and what the print professional realy needs.

Oh well, I never much perfered page layout, too dull and what I did do was mostly Quark 3/4 and Crossfield 895 and JupiterMax assembly workstations in the mid 80's. For most of my 16 years in the biz, I did mostly photo retouch, color correction, and provided prepress services (trapping, preflight, etc.....). I eventually became color control adminstrator and prepress coordinator, well at leased until Federated Department Stores decided to kill off Fingerhut (4000+ people out the door).

Pressently I work for a local Advertsing School as Facility/Lab Manager and Provide Information Services among a few dozen other things. So I do some GoLive, Imageready and Photoshop work, but not much InDesign any more. I do the odd freelance gig from home, but it's mostly Illustrator and Photo Retouch work.

J. Stuart J.

Oh i wasnt sure if u did use indesign stuart, thats great to hear! I tried clipping paths but i must be doing something wrong. I made a clipping path and exported to eps from photoshop, but when i placed the eps file into indesign it had a white background and printed white.



Maybe i could send you a single page indesign file showing the problem stuart, is that a possibility? Thanks!

Oh in regards to making the imported picture color settings and the indesign settings the same, what do i need to change?

Both are CMYK
My InDesign File has Color Management Disabled, and the Photoshop file has it disabled too.

What other color settings do i need to check?

Also should i have color management on, i don't know alot about it - maybe i should be turning something on before i send it to pdf for the print shop also?

Please help

Ahh... I just did a test, instead of transparency i set the background color of the psd file to same color that it sits on in the indesign file.

And i still get the same problem! Meaning it musnt be a transparency issue. So its more likely a color issues somehow?? I also set them both to use "US Preset Defaults" as the color management - but its still the same. The photoshop image that i exported to a tiff, prints out a slightly darker blue.


Please help this is driving me nuts, and using alot of paper and ink

Ok i tried playing around with it a bit, and I have the same problem when using transparency. Now the issue appears to be printer or RIP related, from what I gathered form the net, It not just youm, when I spool it directly to my hp2500c, i get the same problem with transparent area showing density no matter what I do.

When export it to PDF, pull it into acrobat everything look fine on screen, print normally I see the same problem. But if I print the pdf from Acrobat "as an image" to it prints correctly. I don't have a Postscript RIP on hand to test further. But my intrest has been tweeked, I might send one to kinko's as I have not run across this and now it's got me worried. It's a good thing I never realy trusted transparency and have always used clipping path. But I would like to use transparency.

As a quick test I tried loading the PDF into Photoshop at 300dpi and photoshop RIPed and looked fine. So I am thinking it is just a non-postscript driver thing.

I did find this, on a site with know workarounds for ID2, but it didn't work for me.

quote:

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Transparent objects do not look right on a desktop color printer:

When printing transparent objects from InDesign, Acrobat or Illustrator to a desktop color printer be sure to make sure that advanced color controls are disabled at the printer. The flattener may need to rasterize some transparent objects to represent them correctly. Some desktop printers offer ?enhancements? that render images differently than vector objects. This can sometimes lead to visual differences between objects that appear the same in the original document.

---

This might be worth a read as well:

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/printserviceprovider/assets/TXPGuide.pdf

You may need to sign-up for adobe studio membership [ http://studio.adobe.com/ ] to read the files.
There are also a ton of tutorials written and video something there might help there was a multipart video tut on transparency I did't find much useful in the one I watched but I didn't have much time to view the others.


J. Stuart J.

(Edited by jstuartj on 09-23-2004 11:31)

Thanks Stuart, I did get around the problem using clipping paths in the end, and it works great... however i still dont see why it happens. Its not just transparency either, if you bring one raster image in with the same color as a background you have in indesign, it prints a different color. To me that shoudlnt happen, especially from the same software manufacturer.

Actually from what i have noticed it made sense that it was a vector/raster problem, still i dont see why it treats color the same. I couldnt get my printer to print it properly at all, though i did hear someone mention a setting i the transparency flattener, moving the slider from vector graphics all the way to bitmap/raster.

I dont know what else this effects tho so i would rather not do it. Clipping paths are easy enough tho, an i guess they are really the proper way to do things perhaps.

My last option was going to be to import the background from photoshop also, i guess meaning it was a raster bitmap so the color should be the same. But i dunno, maybe it would have worked fine anyway on a postscript printer? Maybe not.. but not a risk i like to take.