Adobe 62000236 Extended User Guide - Page 429

USING ACROBAT 9 PRO EXTENDED 423 Color management Obtaining custom profiles for desktop printers If the output profiles that come with your printer don't produce satisfactory results, you obtain custom profiles in the following ways: • Purchase a profile for your type of printer and paper. This is usually the easiest and least expensive method. • Purchase a profile for your specific printer and paper. This method involves printing a profiling target on your printer and paper, and providing that target to a company that will create a specific profile. This is more expensive than purchasing a standard profile, but can provide better results because it compensates for any manufacturing variations in printers. • Create your own profile using a scanner-based system. This method involves using profile-creation software and your own flatbed scanner to scan the profiling target. It can provide excellent results for matte surface papers, but not glossy papers. (Glossy papers tend to have fluorescent brighteners in them that look different to a scanner than they do in room light.) • Create your own profile using a hardware profile-creation tool. This method is expensive but can provide the best results. A good hardware tool can create an accurate profile even with glossy papers. • Tweak a profile created using one of the previous methods with profile-editing software. This software can be complex to use, but it lets you correct problems with a profile or simply adjust a profile to produce results more to your taste. More Help topics "Install a color profile" on page 426 Color-managing PDFs for printing When you create Adobe PDFs for commercial printing, you can specify how color information is represented. The easiest way to do this is using a PDF/X standard; however, you can also specify color-handling options manually in the Output section of the PDF dialog box. For more information about PDF/X and how to create PDFs, search Help. In general, you have the following choices for handling colors when creating PDFs: • (PDF/X-3) Does not convert colors. Use this method when creating a document that will be printed or displayed on various or unknown devices. When you select a PDF/X-3 standard, color profiles are automatically embedded in the PDF. • (PDF/X-1a) Converts all colors to the destination CMYK color space. Use this method if you want to create a pressready file that does not require any further color conversions. When you select a PDF/X-1a standard, no profiles are embedded in the PDF. • (Illustrator and InDesign) Converts colors that have embedded profiles to the destination color space, but preserves the numbers for those colors without embedded profiles. You can manually select this option in the Output section of the PDF dialog box. Use this method if the document contains CMYK images that aren't color-managed and you want to make sure that the color numbers are preserved. Note: All spot color information is preserved during color conversion; only the process color equivalents convert to the designated color space. More Help topics "Using a safe CMYK workflow" on page 418 Last updated 9/30/2011