PDF Output - images are dark and text fuzzy

[martenf]

I am having a serious issue with the PDF output from Affinity Publisher v2.2.

The images all appear too dark and the fonts are fuzzy.

This only happens when the printing company prints the publication. I have printed this on my colour inkjet and on a colour laser printer and they turn out as expected...good.

I have experimented with numerous settings but the basic profile is using CMYK and Print Ready.

The previous publication printed fine and was under V2.1. 

 I have gone through a process of elimination:

• Checked and compared settings from the last magazine and found them to be the same.
• Experimented with a number of settings for the PDF output.
• Tried different CMYK settings
• Flattened the PDF
• Compared the PDFs output on the screen and as my display has a P3 colour profile (very accurate display), they not only look perfect but are not the way that they have printed by the printing company.

I have not tested this yet but I am wondering of the settings for publications are saved with the file or does it just pick up the settings from the last document edited?

Has anyone else come across this issue and if so, how was it resolved?

 

[tudor]

3 hours ago, martenf said:

the fonts are fuzzy

That could happen if the text was rasterized in the PDF for some reason. Or if you have black text that is CMYK black instead of 100% K black.

3 hours ago, martenf said:

my display has a P3 colour profile (very accurate display)

That won't help you much when working for print. You still need to calibrate your display if you want a more accurate simulation of CMYK colors on screen.

[Hangman]

Hi @martenf,

From your initial description, this sounds more like an issue with your print company but without seeing a sample PDF it's going to be difficult to track down.

Are you able to either upload the PDF exported from Affinity Publisher v2.2 or at least a sample page that represents the issues you're seeing when printed, i.e., the fuzzy text and dark images so we can take a look to determine whether or not there is an issue with the PDF itself or whether this is indeed an issue with how the print company is processing your file?

[martenf]

1 hour ago, Hangman said:

Hi @martenf,

From your initial description, this sounds more like an issue with your print company but without seeing a sample PDF it's going to be difficult to track down.

Are you able to either upload the PDF exported from Affinity Publisher v2.2 or at least a sample page that represents the issues you're seeing when printed, i.e., the fuzzy text and dark images so we can take a look to determine whether or not there is an issue with the PDF itself or whether this is indeed an issue with how the print company is processing your file?

I have attached a 2 page spread which is just photos. Every PDF output looks perfect on my display and when it is printed, even text, just not from the printer company.

Pages40_41.pdf

[Return]

7 hours ago, martenf said:

The previous publication printed fine and was under V2.1. 

Perhaps this is related to the icc profile issues in version 2.2 and mostly happening on macos.

[Hangman]

Hi @martenf,

I can see nothing wrong with your PDF file at all in terms of quality. The Page numbers are vector, the images 300 dpi sRGB2014 and the image quality looks absolutely fine.

The only slightly odd thing I spotted when re-opening the PDF in Publisher and viewing it in a PDF viewer is that the two images at the top of Page 40 appear as rectangles rather than image layers in Publisher and are subsequently missing as images in the PDF viewer despite appearing on the page itself but I can't see that this would be the cause for darker images or fuzzy text.

The Page numbers themselves are not K100 but rather a CMYK split so the only thing I can think here in terms of any fuzziness is that there is a slight misregistration at the printer's end which would potentially account for the fuzzy text.

Is all the text throughout the magazine a CMYK split rather than K100?

In terms of the images appearing dark, does the print company use or request a specific colour profile to be embedded in the supplied PDF file? The PDF uses a Generic CMYK profile and it sounds as though the print company has likely converted the file to whichever profile they use for their press which does have the potential to change the appearance of the images and subsequently could result in darker images depending on the profile used...

Based on the checks you've detailed it doesn't sound as though anything has changed between the Publisher setup used in v2.1 and that in v2.2.

What is the print company saying in terms of why the images appear too dark and why the text is fuzzy?

Finally, could you provide a link to the print company's website so we can see if they show any particular specs they require when providing print-ready PDF files?

[martenf]

11 hours ago, Hangman said:

Hi @martenf,

I can see nothing wrong with your PDF file at all in terms of quality. The Page numbers are vector, the images 300 dpi sRGB2014 and the image quality looks absolutely fine.

The only slightly odd thing I spotted when re-opening the PDF in Publisher and viewing it in a PDF viewer is that the two images at the top of Page 40 appear as rectangles rather than image layers in Publisher and are subsequently missing as images in the PDF viewer despite appearing on the page itself but I can't see that this would be the cause for darker images or fuzzy text.

The Page numbers themselves are not K100 but rather a CMYK split so the only thing I can think here in terms of any fuzziness is that there is a slight misregistration at the printer's end which would potentially account for the fuzzy text.

Is all the text throughout the magazine a CMYK split rather than K100?

In terms of the images appearing dark, does the print company use or request a specific colour profile to be embedded in the supplied PDF file? The PDF uses a Generic CMYK profile and it sounds as though the print company has likely converted the file to whichever profile they use for their press which does have the potential to change the appearance of the images and subsequently could result in darker images depending on the profile used...

Based on the checks you've detailed it doesn't sound as though anything has changed between the Publisher setup used in v2.1 and that in v2.2.

What is the print company saying in terms of why the images appear too dark and why the text is fuzzy?

Finally, could you provide a link to the print company's website so we can see if they show any particular specs they require when providing print-ready PDF files?

Thanks for the comprehensive response. I will investigate what you have drawn attention to and see what I can determine from that.

The printing company is very vague about their end. Their only response is that the last magazine printed fine and this one doesn't but will pursue further with them. They claimed they did two runs. One with the previous and another with the new and had made not changes to their configuration. The results were poor for the latest.

I had asked the question whether PDF output configuration is saved with a publication or is general in that it uses on any publication what ever the last settings were. I still need to test that further.

 

[martenf]

12 hours ago, Return said:

Perhaps this is related to the icc profile issues in version 2.2 and mostly happening on macos.

What are the icc profile issues you are referring to? I am using this on a Mac.