Color Breaking PDFs (Available Extensions or Plugins?)

[Kathleen_K@adobeforums.com]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any plugins or extensions for Acrobat that will automatically color break PDFs? My office currently has Gluon ColorBreaker for Quark, but it is not detailed enough--it does not give detailed breakdowns for placed Illustrator or Photoshop images. In my industry, every element in placed charts or every beveled edge in a placed logo must be accounted for, color-wise.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas or suggestions, other than doing this manually--which we're currently doing. Talk about tedious...

Thanks,
Kathleen

I'm currently using Acrobat 7.0 Professional.
G5 tower, running OS 10.4.2
Have all CS and CS2 Adobe aps.
Quark 6.5

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

I think I know what you're looking for: You're looking for callouts pointing to the color mixes of each element on the page. You couldn't do this in Acrobat, as far as I know. You'll probably continue to need to do it in QuarkXPress. But I've never seen any software that would do it for placed graphics. And what would you do with a pixel image anyway? All you can list is its color space.

[Kathleen_K@adobeforums.com]

Hi Steve,

As far as Photoshop images go, if it is strictly continuous tone/photographic, an arrow pointing to it that says "4C" is fine. But if it is a Photoshop image that uses spot channels, we'd like arrows to identify the areas that use the PMS colors.

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

Does the OUTPUT PREVIEW and SHOW filter under ADVANCED help ?

(I might be missing the point here though?)

Jon

[peter kleinheider]

Hi Kathleen

Acrobat Pro comes with a great Preflight functionality. This technology you can use to filter out various objects that do not meet your criteria. As a result you get a list of objects, for example all elements color with SpotColors, you can easily navigate to.

Might this help?

rgds
Peter

[Kathleen_K@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for your suggestions everyone, but they wont solve my mystery. For anyone not familiar with color breaking a document, check out this link. It shows you how Gluon ColorBreaker for Quark works:

<http://www.thepowerxchange.com/cloner_945_prd1.html>

From the Gluon Website ([url]http://www.gluon.com/product-colorbreaker.html):[/url]
"Color markup of documents is a time consuming task that art directors and production managers have been doing manually since the advent of color printing. ColorBreaker ends that. It is absolutely accurate and unbelievably fast...It produces much more detailed and precise labels than if done by hand. ColorBreaker places 'tags' that contain pertinent color information and accurately point to items and text blocks with "smart" arrows. This information contains everything your printer will need...ColorBreaker labels QuarkXPress elements and imported graphics as well..."

I was just wondering if something similar exists for Acrobat. At this point in time, I'm going to assume that it doesn't.

(Adobe, if you're listening, this would be a fantastic add-on! As PDF workflows replace traditional .QXD workflows, the need for accurate and detailed color breaks remains. Please consider. Thanks!)

[peter kleinheider]

Hi Kathleen

Something similar can be done when doing a preflight and storing the result as comments. It might not look that nice, but it would get close.

Unfortunately images in PDF files have no names. And a placed Artwork can not be defined as such any more when a PDF was generated out of the Layout applications.

rgds

Peter

[Kathleen_K@adobeforums.com]

Hi Peter,

The names of the files are not actually that important to me. The only reason I was hoping that something like this existed in Acrobat instead of Quark is that ColorBreaker is fantastic at naming Quark elements, but it really falls short when it comes to naming placed items.

My rational for seeing if Acrobat would do this is that, since all items/elements are present in the file and nothing is "placed," that maybe each element would receive the same attention/detail when the colors are broken down.

Let's use the McDonalds logos as an example. After color breaking the Quark file with Gluon Colorbreaker, a placed 4 color Illustrator McDonalds logo will simply have an arrow pointing to it that says "Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black."

In my fantasy world, the logo, when colorbroken, would have two arrows pointing to it that indicated the 4c breakdown for each element. In the case of the McDonalds logo, one arrow would point to the Yellow and read (C4, M3, Y82, K2) and another arrow would point to the Red and read (C26, M85, Y97, K10). This is what we currently do by hand at my Ad Agency and it really is time consuming.

I'll look into storing PreFlight result as comments, but we need something pleasing to the eye that we can send to clients and whatnot...

Thanks!
Kathleen

[peter kleinheider]

Maybe you can send me the logo in I make a color breakout report for you

peter at inpetto dot cc

rgds

Peter