change of color when saving file as pdf

[ritika]

i made a file in illus 10 and used purple as the background .
when i saved the file as a pdf , the purple turned into a horrible blue.
how do i rectify this as i have to send a pdf file to my client for approval .
i designed the illus file in cmyk
pls reply as it is urgent

[AdobeAce]

Hi Ritika,

A couple of things may be happening --

First thought is that the Illustrator file may be CMYK, but the PDF is not. Make sure you create your PDF as CMYK.

Next thought is that how your design looks on screen is of little importance if its final use is for print. Get a proof of your design. If your Acrobat was made correctly, it should print the same from both illustrator and Acrobat.

As I said in my email to you -- You're far more likely to get a good answer from the production experts on this site like DCurry, The Repro Kid, ...

Ace

[The Repro Kid]

I don't have distiller here at home and I've been home a lot lately, so I can't reference my distiller settings I use at work, or even the menu locations, but distiller usually defaults to web specs, rgb, 72 dpi, etc I think. You need to make sure your distiller color settings agree somewhat with your Illustrator settings. The distiller settings are somewhat buried and I can't remember where so I'm not being much help. I won't be at work any time soon so won't be able look it up. :(

I'm definitely not being much help. But there are things lurking in Illustrator, such as spot colors usually look different in an illustrator printout compared to a distilled PDF. (If your color is a spot it may or may not look more accurate in the distiller than in the illustrator file but If you don't look up the real swatch color you might not know which one is the most accurate.)

I frequently have to turn my spot colors in illustrator to cmyk before printing and then save this change to an eps to be distilled otherwise the printout and the PDF just won't match each-other. The client sees both so the pdf and the printout have to match. But then when it hits the press the spot color is used and naturally it does not match the pdf or the print out but matches the swatches, but the client doesn't notice this type of thing, as long the PDF and print look equal they don't seem notice the rest of the final process. Clients will be clients!

You said you designed the illustrator file in CMYK but is the purple you are using CMYK purple or spot purple. If it is cmyk, what is the breakdown? If it is PMS what is the number?

[G4pj]

How are you chosing colors? Sometimes that can be the culprit if you just sort of pick a color.

Spot colors may change going from Illustrator to pdf, and they may never look like the swatch from the swatch book, because they are designed is such a way for you to tell the differences on screen. So Acrobat may preview the spots differently.

Process colors are different from RGB. If you pick a blue thats C:90 M:90 Y:3 K:3, you can drop the 3% yellow and black, even for trapping, those values are low. It should then look similar in Acrobat.

Something else to think about, if you're working in an RGB document, and you convert to CMYK for output, your colors are going to be mismatched with the "on the fly" conversion. I've gotten a few RGB pdf files, and had to grince when converting to CMYK. The customer had to be advised, and look at another file (even though it was the one they sent me).

pj