Losing colour vibrancy when exporting to PDF

[Rhobust]

I would appreciate help on this one. When we export our publication to a PDF, there is a noticeable flattening of the vibrancy of the image. Brightness is dulled and black is lightened.

We are using the Coated FOGRA39 Colour Profile as recommended by our printer and Export to PDF Compatibility PDF/X-4 with Overprint Black, and Convert image colour spaces turned on.

Even on our office printer here, the difference between printing straight from Affinity and then printing from Adobe Acrobat is quite noticeable, with the Adobe version much less vibrant, with bright colours less intense and the black less dark.

Any advice would be welcome 

[Dazmondo77]

Sounds like your documents are set to RGB then converting to Fogra39 on output which would cause a noticeable colour shift

The Affinity print engine is currently very very basic and cannot output CMYK and only very basic vectors so sending say an A4 magazine ad to print that is setup from the outset in CMYK and printing to a postscript printer or rip would result in a conversion from CMYK to RGB then back to CMYK?!?!?! and fonts and vectors pre rasterised before hitting the rip - currently, the only reliable option is Acrobat, so the much less vibrant colours you are getting will be much closer to the finished print run when using a print house.

My background is in print so I always use CMYK from the outset along with a set palette of global colours, if my print provider wanted Fogra39 I would start the job using that profile this would give a more accurate screen representation and proof (from Acrobat not Affinity) and all your colour percentages would remain intact ie a single pass 100% black wouldn't be converted to a rich black with an ink density around 290% as some print providers I have used would reject a job with a density over 260% 

[Rhobust]

Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry I couldn't get back to you straight away. 

Our Document Setup is CMYK/8 - I am not sure whether it should be set to Convert or Assign?

Our normal practice is to convert all images to CMYK Tiff before placing them in the document.

I did make a mistake, in that I thought I was dealing with a proof copy from the print house, but in fact it was from our own printer/copier! 

We are yet to get the proof from our Print House, and so hopefully we will get a better result.

Many thanks