Printer says my image is too dark? What do I do?

[Tom_Heaney@adobeforums.com]

I am an amateur and created a newspaper advertisment for a friend. In the ad I place a color image of a charcoal drawing on paper (i.e. primarily shades of grey). The image and final pdf is RGB color not greyscale. The image is a 5M pixel photo converted to 300 dpi jpeg in Photoshop. I ahve not applied any half toning to the photo. The printer told me a 300 dpi image is good and even somewhat overkill. So I built this ad in Illustrator. Imported it into InDesign and created the pdf from Indesign to ship off to the printer.

I went this cumbersome route because I am new to the CS and somehow just inserting the jpg or tiff files into Illustrator blows the file size up. I place a 500k jpg file into a 100K AI file and all of a sudden my AI file is 7MB and the pdf from AI is about the same size. I found if I then took the AI file and placed it in InDesign then went to pdf it would be in the 200K range. But that is a different story/question I don't have time for right now.

I just got a vm from the printer that said the image is printing too dark and I have to lighten it.

I haven't a clue what to do and I have to have the fix in tomorrow. Is this a half-tone thing. Do you even do half-tones in desktop publishing?
I am sure it is a simple thing that you pros know and I am just not aware of. The problem is that I can not experiment I have 1 shot to get this reasonably right. Can anyone help?

I don't know whether I messed this up in InDesign, AI or PHotoshop so I am putting this question in all 3 forums.

Tom

[Karen_C@adobeforums.com]

I'm assuming the newspaper advert is greyscale.
Converting a RGB image at newspaper end to greyscale can have strange results and is not recommended.
(a)In photoshop change the photo to grayscale and save as a different name eg photo-g.psd (I always save as PSD, but JPG can be used isn't recommended). Image/Mode/Grayscale
(b) You could also try Image/Adjustments/Levels and see what you can do there. I recommend you save alternate named files, just in case you want to go back to the original.
(c) Back in Indesign, create your advert to correct size and place photo.
(c) Save a backup file first.
Then select Edit/Select All; then choose Text/ Convert text to outlines
(d) Print to PDF Acrobat 4 compatible (1.3) as grayscale, with
bicubic resampling to 200-250 for color and grayscale, and 2400 for monochrome.

I use the international settings at
<http://www.3dap.com.au/3dapv2.htm>

[Tom_Heaney@adobeforums.com]

Karen,

Thanks so much for your response. While waiting I decided to start lightening the image in PHotoshop and did. Then placed it again into AI. Then placed whole thing into InDesign. I know its roundabout way of doing it but I don't know Indesign well enough to do it alone.

I can't do a type>create outlines. I'm sure this is related to the AI step. When I print from Indesign - file > print I don't get the options you discuss. First off I am on a Windows XP environment. And what I get is the print dialog box with printer> Adobe PDF, on the output tab I have color > composite gray, flip>none, and Screening > default, under graphics tab images I have send data>optimized sampling and fonts download > complete.

No choice on version of PDF, or resampling.

The new PDF looks a whole lot better, but I am curious why I am not getting the options you are mentioning. I got them when I went from AI to pdf but not Indesign. Hmmm...strange

Thanks again.

[Bob_Levine]

Tom,

Before converting to grayscale, take a look at the RGB channels to see
if one of them might be a better choice for your grayscale image.

The reason the file size is blowing up in Illy is because the file is
uncompressed there. No need for InDesign here, IMO. Just add your text
in Illy and save as PDF there.

Bob