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[leonardr]

Originally Posted by Matt Richards

I'm in the process of testing CS4 for deployment to a large print production environment and I'm seeing some interesting behavior in so far as it's handling of color management is concerned, specifically with Same as Source printing from Acrobat.

I currently have CS2 deployed, and we're using InDesign for page composition. We primarily accept Adobe RGB (1998) and US Web Coated (SWOP) artwork. PDFs are created from InDesign via File > Export, and we have it configured for "No Color Conversion" and "Include all Profiles." As such, our PDFs contain both RGB and CMYK artwork, all of which is tagged with an ICC profile.

Are you exporting as standard PDF or as one of the PDF/X variants? if PDF/X, which one? If standard PDF, what versions?

Do you documents contain any transparency? Any use of overprinting?

In Acrobat 7, we submit these files "Same as Source" to our RIPs (Fiery and Wasatch) in order to preserve the embedded profiles.

So first thing you need to understand is that Postscript does NOT support profiles - so that it may be IMPOSSIBLE to preserve embedded profiles "intact". Instead, what happens (in most cases) is that the profiles are converted into Postscript's classic color management methods. There are Adobe extensions to Postscript that enable "pass through profiles" which may or may not be in use.

All of our color management is handled at the RIP. This works quite nicely. We have tested the submissions and the RGB and CMYK builds (color numbers) come through dead on.

Then wouldn't it make more sense to simply submit the PDFs directly to the RIP via a "hot folder" or similar workflow - why bring Acrobat into the mix to force it to convert to Postscript? This is especially true for when you move to a native PDF-based printing solution (eg. Adobe PDF Print Engine).

So the question is: What changes have been made in Acrobat 9 to cause for it to handle Same as Source print submissions differently? Why is it that our builds are changing when Same as Source has always been how we get "pass through" color from Acrobat?

In Acrobat 8 we made major changes to how printing takes place to bring Acrobat and the rest of the Creative Suite inline with each other - so that there is (since CS3) complete consistent color and printing handling among the applications in the suite.

Leonard