Recently, I wrote about our catalog project that required the usage of multiple metallic, spot color inks. It took some trial and error, but we got things set up correctly to do the workflow and the PDFs turned out ok.

At least so we thought! The printer has been working on processing our files the last couple of weeks and discovered a situation with one section of the catalog that was causing a problem. There were about ten, seemingly random pages in this section that were not separating correctly. They were all created in the same exact fashion with the same exact settings so it was very strange to hear this.

After we heard about the problem, I went to our workstations and verified all the settings just to be sure nothing had accidentally been flipped. But no, everything looked as expected. Nothing amiss anywhere. The settings in Quark were fine as were the settings in Distiller.

Yet we were able to verify the problem does exist in those PDFs. It’s a little tough to check the individual plates in a PDF but we found a way to do it. Mike discovered that if you open the file in Acrobat Professional, and then go to the Print Window, there is a section that lets you get a small preview of each ink/plate. By turning them off individually, we were able to see that our PDFs were, in fact, NOT separating correctly! Our spot colors were being incorrectly converted to CMYK. The printer was right on this one. Talk about “panic”, this was a good time to think about it.

Thankfully, the “damage” seemed to be very limited, and only to these 10 or so files. That was good to hear. All we needed to do was track down what was causing the problem and how to fix it. That’s my job.

Like I said, I checked everything. I mean everything. Usually, I can spot the culprit pretty quick, but this problem had me stumped for a while. I ran multiple tests and changed things up a bit to see if I could isolate where the problem was happening. Nothing was popping up, the problem’s source was not evident.

I was both frustrated and curious at the same time. It was very frustrating because everything “looked” like it should, yet we could not figure out the cause of the issue. At the same time, I was very curious to solve the puzzle, because that’s just what the situation was – a puzzle.

Finally, we had a breakthrough – let’s try a new picture box and see if the problem disappears when distilling. So Mike did that on his file and sure enough, it separated correctly! The plot thickenned.

We changed out the picture boxes and I went ahead with a full scale test. Sadly, the problem returned! D’oh!! Alright, now I was really perplexed. Then I spotted something unusual in the Quark file. There is this option for picture boxes that let’s you select a specific channel in an image and use it as a mask. I played with that setting and noticed a shift in color on screen. Hmmm… that was interesting. I re-ran those pages after playing with the mask channels and  we got perfect PDFs again.

How bizarre!

Well, I don’t know why that had anything to do with anything, but at least in our case, that’s what did the trick. It took a team effort and a lot of detective work, but we solved this puzzle. It was a late and harried night, but we got the revised PDFs uploaded to the printer before heading for home – with another valuable experience gained.