Fan of creative technology, elearning, instructional design and a little geeky

Output Preview and RGB image display

July 5, 2007 5 Comments Written by Cari Jansen

Digitip 058 – Acrobat 8 Professional

Someone recently said to me: “I hate the Output Preview in Acrobat”, “If you select the correct similuation profile for CMYK output, it doesn’t show you that your file has RGB images, but just shows you CMYK”.

Well, that might carry a little truth, in that when hovering the mouse over your graphics, the separations read out is CMYK, but you can still display your RGB images…

Output Preview

Output Preview (Advanced > Print Production) is a great way to soft-proof documents on screen based on a selected Simulation Profile.

The Separations Preview enables checking of colour separations related to the selected Simulation Profile and can check Total Area Coverage. In addition it allows you to perform some simple preflight checks on your document. Using the Ink Manager, you can convert spot colours to process or remap them to other spot colours.

Output Preview

You can change the Total Area Coverage percentage to the appropriate precentage for your output. For example the selected Fogra27 Simulation profile is based on a 350% TAC.

Total Area Coverage

You can also change the overlay colour that displays in areas of your PDF that exceed the TAC value.

Total Area Coverage

The Color Warnings preview is used to discover Overprinting and Rich Black objects in the PDF.

Color Warnings

RGB in Output Preview

Ok, I went off on a little side trip there… Let’s get back to the question. How can I display RGB images in Acrobat’s Output Preview when I have a CMYK Simulation Profile selected?

RGB preview

The answer lies in the selected Show option. All it takes is setting this to RGB, and only RGB images are displayed in Preview.

It is amazing to see how easy it is to overlook a setting like that. But there it is 🙂

Total Area Coverage: The combined total of all the ink percentages in one area. Also referred to as Total Ink Limit. For certain print processes, getting the total ink limit just right is critical in order to achieve the correct print out. For instance for Newspaper publishing you’d generally only need a total area coverage of around 240%. Any higher and your graphics will turn to mud as a result of dot gain.

Rich Black: A black colour that contains additional CMY percentages in its breakdown.

Acrobat Pro
, , ,
Similar posts
  • Creating a pop-up window in a PDF with Adobe InDesig... — In the following YouTube tutorial, we’ll create an interactive PDF from Adobe InDesign, in which we click on a button, which in turn opens up a simple pop-up window containing a close-box. When the close-box is clicked the pop-up window disappears [...]
  • Help improve Acrobat.com — Adobe’s today launched Acrobat.com Ideas. A portal through which you can submit ideas, vote on ideas and comment on other’s ideas. If you not yet used Acrobat.com: it is well worth a try. You can work collaboratively using Acrobat.com. For instance use it to set-up shared PDF reviews with your client through Adobe’s ConnectNow, or [...]
  • How to. Create a Button that links to First Page of ... — Digitip 074 -Adobe Acrobat 9 Modified: 24 August 9:40pm (slight rewrite, addition Leonard’s comment) Q: I received an email last week, that in a nutshell phrased the following question: How do I create a button on all the pages of a PDF document that, when clicked, links back to the first page of my PDF? [...]
  • Take up the challenge – Acrobat 9 — Adobe today officially announced their new Acrobat 9 range of products, off the shelf are rolling: Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, Acrobat 9 Pro, Acrobat 9 Standard and a new Adobe Reader. Time for organisations to take up the challenge and use Acrobat to its full advantage.  In all honesty what I see in this [...]
  • Adobe PDF Settings location — Ok, those of you who have by now installed the new Acrobat 8 Professional and have Creative Suite 2 installed, might have discovered that the new Distiller doesn’t share its custom Adobe PDF Settings with CS2 Applications, like Distiller 7 did. This is due to the fact the custom Adobe Settings are no longer stored [...]

5 Comments
  1. sandrar sandrar
    September 11, 2009    

    Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. 🙂 Cheers! Sandra. R.

    Reply
    • Cari Jansen Cari Jansen
      September 11, 2009    

      @Sandra: thank you [blushing]

      Reply
  2. Alexwebmaster Alexwebmaster
    March 3, 2009    

    Hello webmaster
    I would like to share with you a link to your site
    write me here preonrelt@mail.ru

    Reply
  3. Cari Jansen Cari Jansen
    March 16, 2008    

    I definitely agree with you on that Thierry. It is most certainly not a “what you see” is “what you get” type dialog.

    Reply
  4. Thierry Thierry
    March 14, 2008    

    Thank you for your post. It’s always intersting to see somebody trying to understand and explain to others the strange behaviour of this dialog box. But IMHO, it’s to most deceiving tool ever added to an Adobe software. When you know how to use it, it can be useful as you explain it clearly, but for first time users, those informations are really misleading. A lot of people don’t understand that this “preview” (unproperly translated as “aperçu” in the french version of Acrobat) is only a simulation based on a color profile and not the actual state of the file.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *