Color Management nightmare

[Neny design]

I have been having a problem with the colors in print from one of our digital album printing companies. I do the color correction and adjustment in photoshop and embed the profile into the Jpegs. I do the layout in InDesign CS5 and then export a PDF with color settings specified by the printing company. What comes back from them looks nothing like what I see on my screen: skin tones are too red and yellow. I am presuming something is lost in the color conversion of the PDF.... any ideas? Thanks!

[Glenn NK]

Are you using a calibrated monitor? With my limited knowledge, that's all I can think of.

I use Spyder, but there are others that are as good.


Glenn

[Neny design]

Thanks Glen! Yes the monitor is calibrated regularly and I don't have any issues with printing with any other labs (and we use quite a few) when I send jpegs. This is the only lab I have to send PDF's to and I think therein lies the problem, just don't know what it is

[Simon Garrett]

Earlier this year I had a similar problem: when I exported from LR or CS5 to PDF, whatever setting I used, the resulting PDF did not appear to be correctly profiled. In fact, when viewing them in Adobe Reader they looked different on different monitors, implying either the PDFs didn't contain embedded profiles, or Adobe Reader (9.something) isn't colour-managed.

I never fixed the problems, but I was also getting sharpening problems (the exports didn't have the same sharpening settings as jpegs or tifs) so I've given up trying to use pdfs for important photos. It just doesn't work for me.

[Colin Southern]

I do the color correction and adjustment in photoshop and embed the profile into the Jpegs.

What profile are you embedding?