Acrobat & Quite a Box of Tricks Color Settings on a PC

[CruzinCooler]

Acrobat & Quite a Box of Tricks Color Settings on a PC

We are a Mac shop (Digital Presses) with the exception of one major account and its on a PC. We use the latest version of Acrobat and Pitstop with an Acrobat plug-in called Quite a Box of Tricks. All the work comes in as RGB, usually created from Excel and Word docs. This will not change because the customer is a Financial Institution and not a printer and just wants it printed as is. After preflight, the supplied PDFs are RGB and fonts are not embedded so we re-postscript all files utilizing Distiller to embed fonts and than convert all RGB color to CMYK utilizing Quite a Box of Tricks v1.8i. Its an old workflow thats worked for years and I recently inherited the account. Yay! The issue is that on the we installed the latest Acrobat and it’s now a 64 bit app and Quite is a 32 bit app and will not work together. I need to match the old RGB to CMYK color conversion from Quite a Box of Tricks of previous jobs to a new Pitstop color conversion. This is for new jobs to match color from older jobs such as reprints. In the Colours tab we select “RGB Gone” Convert all colours to CMYK if needed for colour separation. There is a Setup… box to click on to change settings and when opened it says: Precise: use Microsoft ICM with ICC profile. Under that is a Clickable box saying CMYK profile.. and the selected profile used is: Photoshop 5 Default CMYK. I’m stuck on how to arrive at the conversion using Pitstop to match or come close to that conversion. Contacted Quite and they will not be updating the app. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[YourCastle]

i'm guessing this goes offset? and the primary need is to convert RGB black to cmyK?

If I was printing them on digital presses, I wouldn't preflight at all, since it's microsoft word.

And also... the preflight at your shop removes the embed? seems odd?

no way to install 32-bit Acrobat?

 

[abc]

You won't be able to use the Microsoft ICM, that's not available.
You'll have to use the Little CMS CMM
I would suggest you look at the 'Just make my Office PDF work! - CMYK ISO Coated v2' Preflight profile.
Copy it and change the destination profile in the Color Management settings so your destination profile is the 'Photoshop 5 Default CMYK'. You might not see that profile in the list of profiles, so you may need to find wherever Photoshop or Box of Tricks puts it, and move it into the ICC folder that PitStop uses.
This Preflight Profile does a lot more than Box of Tricks (eg adds Bleed etc), so you might want to actually remove some of the Action Lists. See what results you get and compare and adjust as needed.

 

[abc]

In addition I forgot to mention, this profile generates a PDF/X-4 file. If you want to retain that you should probably add the 'Photoshop 5 Default CMYK' Profile as the Output Intent.

 

[CruzinCooler]

You won't be able to use the Microsoft ICM, that's not available.
You'll have to use the Little CMS CMM
I would suggest you look at the 'Just make my Office PDF work! - CMYK ISO Coated v2' Preflight profile.
Copy it and change the destination profile in the Color Management settings so your destination profile is the 'Photoshop 5 Default CMYK'. You might not see that profile in the list of profiles, so you may need to find wherever Photoshop or Box of Tricks puts it, and move it into the ICC folder that PitStop uses.
This Preflight Profile does a lot more than Box of Tricks (eg adds Bleed etc), so you might want to actually remove some of the Action Lists. See what results you get and compare and adjust as needed.

Thank you abc. I'll give this a test later on today. As always I appreciate your help

 

[mrserge]

1. Prepare the color correction flow so it would suite your production from technical perspective.
2. Talk with your customer that due to the changes in the production there is one-time deviation in colors.
I don't believe there is any logical sense to try to replicate very old and very buggy ICC profile just for sake of argument.

From other perspective: if these are MS Office documents, most likely we are talking about the pallet of 10-20 flat colors that was used for graphs/backgrounds/etc. If this is the case, you can also prepare spot replacement action in Pitstop and add it to your preflight.
1. Take some old job and read CMYK values and corresponding RGB values from the original document and prepare replacement table (just write them down somewhere).
2. Make action that is converting RGB to Spot with name thar you will need later.
3. Convert and assign everything to the CMYK colorspace that you are willing to use (including all RGB that is left in document), but leave spots as they are.
4. Convert spots to corresponding CMYK values.

This way you will make a workaround and have RGB->CMYK conversion independent from ICC profiles.

 

[CruzinCooler]

1. Prepare the color correction flow so it would suite your production from technical perspective.
2. Talk with your customer that due to the changes in the production there is one-time deviation in colors.
I don't believe there is any logical sense to try to replicate very old and very buggy ICC profile just for sake of argument.

From other perspective: if these are MS Office documents, most likely we are talking about the pallet of 10-20 flat colors that was used for graphs/backgrounds/etc. If this is the case, you can also prepare spot replacement action in Pitstop and add it to your preflight.
1. Take some old job and read CMYK values and corresponding RGB values from the original document and prepare replacement table (just write them down somewhere).
2. Make action that is converting RGB to Spot with name thar you will need later.
3. Convert and assign everything to the CMYK colorspace that you are willing to use (including all RGB that is left in document), but leave spots as they are.
4. Convert spots to corresponding CMYK values.

This way you will make a workaround and have RGB->CMYK conversion independent from ICC profiles.

I appreciate this work around/fix. I'll give it a shot. Thanks mrserge.