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

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CruzinCooler
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Joined: Wed Aug 11, 2021 6:31 pm

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

Post by CruzinCooler »

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 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.
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Quite a Box Color Settings_CMYK Panel.jpg
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prepressscott
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Re: Acrobat & Quite a Box of Tricks Color Settings on a PC

Post by prepressscott »

I guess the first thing you need to know is what profile Photoshop 5 is using. Then open up Colour management preferences in Acrobat and choose that profile. Then open up Enfocus colour management prefs and tell it to use Acrobat settings. You won't be able to use Microsoft ICM, I use Little CMS which I believe is superior. You may not get exactly the same result but if customer is supplying RGB then I don't suppose they are going to be too fussy! Software is constantly being updated and changed, they'll soon get used to it!
bens
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Re: Acrobat & Quite a Box of Tricks Color Settings on a PC

Post by bens »

In addition to what prepressscott said: you'll also need to specify an RGB profile. Colour conversions always need a source and target; the screenshot you included does not show which RGB profile is being used. The most likely candidates are either sRGB - a de-facto standard for many RGB images - or your display profile. I'd suggest trying sRGB.

There is no specific setting in PitStop for treating R=G=B as greyscale. This is however the result you will get with colour management turned off.
CruzinCooler
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Re: Acrobat & Quite a Box of Tricks Color Settings on a PC

Post by CruzinCooler »

Thanks prepressscott and bens. I'll test the results later today
yosimo
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Re: Acrobat & Quite a Box of Tricks Color Settings on a PC

Post by yosimo »

Hi CruzinCooler,

have you tried Acrobat's preflight? For example, to convert rgb data to CMYK you can use the supplied profile "Convert color to Coated FOGRA39 (convert spot colors to CMYK)", which uses the target profile "Coated FOGRA39 (ISO 12647-2:2004)".

Image

I rather prefer the target profile "ISO Coated v2 (ECI)", which can be downloaded from http://www.eci.org/doku.php?id=en:downloads and then installed in Acrobat Preflight (under Preferences). Of course, depending on the output, another suitable color profile can be included.
With the Edit function you can fine-tune the color conversion.

(Interesting tips for RGB to CMYK conversion can also be found at PDFX-ready https://www.pdfx-ready.ch/en/guideline/
A newer version is available in german language.)


For embedding missing fonts there is also the ready-made preflight profile "Embed fonts (even if text is invisible)".

Image

With these preflight features of Acrobat you don't need any additional software.

Good luck trying it out,
yosimo
CruzinCooler
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Joined: Wed Aug 11, 2021 6:31 pm

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

Post by CruzinCooler »

Thank you yosimo, I'll give this a try next week when I'm back in office. Thank you for your help.
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