PDF for print and PDF press ready what's the difference?

[Ryan Clarke]

I'm preparing this book for CMYK print. But I am confused by the PDF settings in Publisher. When exporting to PDF I get 'PDF for print' and 'PDF press ready'. I cannot see any difference in output by the two. Print and press sound like the same thing to me.

Secondly, how is a 2 page spread any use for a printer? They aren't going to be printing two pages out on one sheet at the same time. The print is going to be on opposite sides of the paper. But the PDF output gives the impression it is going to be two pages on one large sheet of paper.

For instance, when I print out on my two sided laser printer directly from Publisher I get the results I'm after. But when I export as a PDF it shows the two page layout, but there are no options for printing the layout as 2 sides. It just prints facing pages on 1 sheet of A4 at a reduced scale. Increasing scale to normal means both sides are printed too large for the paper.

And lastly, how can I properly print out a CMYK document and see the colours as they will be printed using my laser printer. I am only using black and white text, but when I print out the document, I am seeing more of a charcoal grey than a black. The same font inside text editor printes out deep black. I assume this is the CMYK difference. Can I just output the same document as RGB from my printer or will it still show the same greys insead of blacks?

[walt.farrell]

When you're creating a document (File > New), Print gives you an RGB document, and Print (Press Ready) gives you a CMYK document.

On the iPad, something similar happens when Exporting, but it may also depend on what settings your document already has. In any case, it should be an RGB vs CMYK difference if you look closely at the settings.

For the number of pages: You want to choose "All Pages" rather than the default "All Spreads" in the Export dialog. Many of us have asked them to reverse that default.

For the text: what Black are you specifying? If you're using a K100 Black it won't be as dark as a Rich Black (composed of a mix of all 4 colors, CMYK.

 

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Ryan Clarke said:

When exporting to PDF I get 'PDF for print' and 'PDF press ready'. I cannot see any difference in output by the two. Print and press sound like the same thing to me.

It seems, for Affinity "print" means "less professional" than "press". (compare small vs. large hardware: 'printer' vs. 'press'). For export there are a few more differences than just colour space which can be identical if your layout document is created in CMYK.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Publishing/publishPDFFiles.html&title=Publishing PDF files

[Ryan Clarke]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

For the text: what Black are you specifying? If you're using a K100 Black it won't be as dark as a Rich Black (composed of a mix of all 4 colors, CMYK.

I'm not sure what you mean by K100. The colour for each font is set at #:000000 in my HSL colour wheel. All my body text, italics, bold are set at the same black. As black as black gets, I assumed.

54 minutes ago, thomaso said:

It seems, for Affinity "print" means "less professional" than "press". (compare small vs. large hardware: 'printer' vs. 'press'). For export there are a few more differences than just colour space which can be identical if your layout document is created in CMYK.

I was not expecting that. I thought it was just a case of changing the shade. But now you mention it, I have noticed that the Brother laser printer I am using shows a noticeable lack of detail in the CMYK print. I can actually see the dots in the grey. I just assumed this to be my printer being at a low resolution. I set it to the highest resolution, but still saw the dots. Is this one of the export differences in CMYK?

Is there no one size fits all conversion I can make from CMYK to RGB. Should I just duplicate the document, change the settings to RGB and then adjust the font colours  accordingly.

One thing I didn't ask, will the final PDFs of the same document - one in RGB, one in CMYK - look noticably different between each other on my monitor. Or are the differences only noticeable on print out? The reason I ask this is because on my title page I had two different words set in the same font at the same black. At least, that's how it was inside the font colour settings. They looked fine in the PDF also. Both deep black. Yet when I printed them out, one word was dark grey, the other black. I could not find out how this had happened, as both bnlacks showed the same in the colour wheel. No matter how many times I printed out the same page I always got that result.

Not sure whether to trust the printer, the PDFs, Publisher, or what?

[walt.farrell]

33 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I'm not sure what you mean by K100. The colour for each font is set at #:000000 in my HSL colour wheel. All my body text, italics, bold are set at the same black. As black as black gets, I assumed.

You said you have a CMYK document. What is the Black color, in CMYK? You may need to switch to Sliders rather than the color wheel. I think that typically a professional printer will want Blacks (especially for text) that are CMYK 0,0,0,100. But that will probably look washed out on a home printer.

The rest of your question in that post is beyond my skill level; sorry.

[thomaso]

12 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I can actually see the dots in the grey. I just assumed this to be my printer being at a low resolution. I set it to the highest resolution, but still saw the dots. Is this one of the export differences in CMYK?

No. The visible printing halftone raster (grid, screen) gets created during the printing process, influenced by the printing app + printer driver + printer hardware. The export settings do not specify this grid or its visibility.

16 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

One thing I didn't ask, will the final PDFs of the same document - one in RGB, one in CMYK - look noticably different between each other on my monitor. Or are the differences only noticeable on print out?

It depends on the colours used in the files for comparison. Some are identical while others exist either in CMYK or in RGB only. This is caused by the technical conditions while the colours are also influenced by the used colour profiles for a) document + b) export + c) monitor. The sRGB profile was created to display the colours of CMYK as similarly as possible. Whereas "similarly" may get interpreted differently: some focus on their individual visual impression, others on numerical values while some prefer the perfect hue others may prefer perfect brightness etc. – This means for your question…

25 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Is there no one size fits all conversion I can make from CMYK to RGB.

… that there can not be such a single solution – although everybody may find one (or more) fully sufficient as one-size-fits-all solution. Since everybody uses a monitor with individual conditions & settings it appears wise to use the sRGB profile as a kind of standard for RGB documents.

If you compare CMYK and RGB colours on screen not only the various involved profiles do matter but also the quality of your monitor hardware + the monitor calibration. If the monitor is technically not able to display a certain colour than no profile setting can help to avoid this lack and no calibration can fix it.

Since your several questions concern various aspects of Colour Management you may want to read according infos or tutorials. There are quite a lot available, for different levels of existing knowledge. These may interest for instance:

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/colour-theory-1-basic-concepts/

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/display-colour-management-in-the-affinity-apps/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woTUsQHvMP8 ("Color profile and Color Calibration" by Olivio Sarikas)

[paleolith]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

You want to choose "All Pages" rather than the default "All Spreads" in the Export dialog. Many of us have asked them to reverse that default.

Indeed, that was the first question I ever asked in this forum.

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I think that typically a professional printer will want Blacks (especially for text) that are CMYK 0,0,0,100.

As a different sample, my printer specifically requests rich black when I'm sending a full color document. OTOH, if I'm only paying for B&W, they want K100.

2 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Not sure whether to trust the printer,

Laser printers are great, but do not trust them for any kind of fidelty, not B&W and especially not color.

I don't know what a B&W laser printer will do with a rich black, and models likely differ. A rich black might be something like C40 M40 Y40 K50 (not a real example), and if the B&W printer simply drops the CMY components and only prints the K50, then that's a gray when you wanted K100 for black.

tomaso gave you a list of links on color management. I've spent many hours reading about color management and CMYK specifically, and I feel I've only scratched the surface. The route from monitor (emitted light) to print (reflected light) is amazingly complex. I'll add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone as one of my starting points.

In my rather limited experience and not-terribly-sensitive eyes, I see little difference between the RGB and CMYK renderings, with the major caveat that I'm doing black text and natural colors, that is, photographs of the real world. You'll find diagrams showing how the RGB gamut is larger than the CMYK gamut. It seems to me -- untrained -- that the excess in the RGB gamut is mostly colors that could be generated by graphics software but seldom found in the rest of the world. Even something as simple as a solid RGB red (255,0,0) cannot be reproduced in CMYK, but you won't find it in most of the real world because when you look at the real world you are seeing reflected light, not emitted.

[Ryan Clarke]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

You said you have a CMYK document. What is the Black color, in CMYK? You may need to switch to Sliders rather than the color wheel. I think that typically a professional printer will want Blacks (especially for text) that are CMYK 0,0,0,100. But that will probably look washed out on a home printer.

Sorry, I had no idea there were CMYK sliders.  They are set thusly for my headings:

I assume this the font colour that came in from my original word document, hence why it is skewy. Is there a way of globally setting all my styles to black, or will I have rto change them once after the next? Also, does the weight of the font change this colour when using the variable slider?

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Since your several questions concern various aspects of Colour Management you may want to read according infos or tutorials. There are quite a lot available, for different levels of existing knowledge. These may interest for instance:

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/colour-theory-1-basic-concepts/

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/display-colour-management-in-the-affinity-apps/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woTUsQHvMP8 ("Color profile and Color Calibration" by Olivio Sarikas)

That is very helpful, will watch these ASAP.

22 minutes ago, paleolith said:

As a different sample, my printer specifically requests rich black when I'm sending a full color document. OTOH, if I'm only paying for B&W, they want K100.

What should I ask the printer regarding technical questions so I don't get it wrong? I did ask them if they could send me a sample CMYK PDF of a short document so that I could see for myself what a final PDF should look like when it goes to the printers, with bleed, cutting points, etc, but they just sent me a layout template for a page instead.

 

Thanks everyone for the help they have been giving me over the weeks. Would go nowhere without this forum.

[paleolith]

16 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

What should I ask the printer regarding technical questions so I don't get it wrong?

The layout template should be clear about bleed size and printer's marks -- ask if not. You can ask specifically "should text be K100 or rich black". A professional print shop will understand this. You can also ask what version of PDF -- my printer wants PDF/X-4, and I suspect this is common but others will have experience with more than one printer.

[Ryan Clarke]

Thank you.

[walt.farrell]

18 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Is there a way of globally setting all my styles to black, or will I have rto change them once after the next? Also, does the weight of the font change this colour when using the variable slider?

How you can change the colors of the Text will depend on whether you used Text Styles for all of it. If so, you can change each Text Style individually. If not, you could try selecting all the text, and changing the color once.

Make sure you know what the Print Shop wants before changing it. Or work in a copy for your home printer.

Using the Variable slider should not change the actual color, though the weight of the font may make it appear darker or lighter, I suppose.

[Ryan Clarke]

Okay, I found this chart online. However, the 100% Black setting doesn't work for me.

I get a muddy brown instead, when I blow the heading font right up.

 

Rick black works for me, but the best setting appears to be 'Registration Black.' Here is Rich black.

So why am I getting a muddy brown when the colour sliders are at zero and the black is cranked all the way up?

 

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I get a muddy brown instead, when I blow the heading font right up.

That is what I would expect to see on a CMYK home printer with a K100 Black. For that, I think you should use a Rich Black instead.

18 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Here is Rich black.

That is like no Rich Black I've ever seen. But it probably depends on your document Color Profile, too.

A Rich Black, for me, is more like this and contains all 4 colors:

 

[paleolith]

5 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

the best setting appears to be 'Registration Black.'

Registration Black won't work for printed images. It's only used for the print registration marks (hence the name), which are not part of your final image.

In general, there's a maximum amount of ink allowed for any area. Typically it's about 300%, but can vary depending on the printer, from about 240% to 330%.

You asked before what you should ask your printer. I did not mention color profile. It's likely U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, but you need to ask. Pick it in the Document Setup, Color tab. AIUI this will at least limit the ink coverage when RGB images are converted to CMYK.

5 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I get a muddy brown instead, when I blow the heading font right up.

Do you mean on screen or printed? What kind of printer are you using?

Walt's Rick Black looks pretty normal. Note that the total coverage is 295%, right around the max for most printing processes.

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

So why am I getting a muddy brown when the colour sliders are at zero and the black is cranked all the way up?

The short version is that is the best black your printer can create using just its black ink cartridge. That is why a "Rich Black" is recommended for darker blacks.

7 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

... but the best setting appears to be 'Registration Black.'

Registration Black is not generally recommended for text because the alignment of the color dots in ink jet printers (the registration of the 4 inks) is never perfect, so this tends to make text blurry & hard to read. It might be OK for very large type sizes like headlines but not for regular text.