I am creating simple tints of Pantones and publishing to PDF. All of a sudden any tints are appearing very dark, almost black, in the resulting PDF. Printing to Primo PDF works as expected. And if I import the PDF back into Drwa it looks correct. Any ideas?
The problem PDF is created using Draw's Publish to PDF.
Palette is Pantone Coated output as Native color.
Viewing in Acrobat Reader. Placing in InDesign shows the same problem.
Attached is a sample Draw file. PDF file follows.
Here's the PDF.
Usually I have it set to prepress, document color settings, native color.
I have finally managed to reproduce the problem in a PDF.
To fix it, it looks as if you need to go to Tools->Color Management->Default Settings and change the value for Spot colour definition to LAB.
Thank you, Harry. That works, but I'm not sure why, nor why it has worked in the past using RGB values but not now. Is that just for on screen viewing?
Again, Thank you for looking into this.
For each spot colour object, the PDF contains a definition of the colour as a pantone tint and a fallback value (either Lab or RGB) for anything that does not understand pantone spot colours. Traditionally, pantone provided RGB values but the newer pantone libraries use Lab values. Corel continues to provide RGB fallback as an option, but it seems that the calculation for tints of pantones was faulty in X6.
Desktop PDF viewers (foxit, adobe reader etc) use the fallback, which is why you see the black squares. Rips performing pantone separation would be reading the pantone definitions, so would be unaffected by the incorrect RGB fallback values. Rips and printers performing CMYK separations could read either value, so some would render correctly and some would render incorrectly,
Evan53 said:why it has worked in the past using RGB values
Was that with X6? Earlier versions probably used pantone libraries based on CMYK values rather than Lab.
Yes, X6 ( X6.3 since there were initially problems with the 6.4 patch). I do several quarterly 2-color newsletters that use lots of tints. I just did one a few weeks ago and had no problems with the PDFs and have never changed the default spot color definitions.