Color presets

Question

Hi,
I recently rendered an image and put this in Photoshop. Turns out it's running in the RGB color channel.
Having then saved the image as a JPEG from Photoshop and reviewing it, the color scheme looks fine (yellows and magentas have the adequate glow to them). Then I place the image in InDesign and it all goes really murky and muddy (in terms of colors). The magenta, for instance, goes rather purple - only in a dark and sort of greyish fashion (not good).
How do I solve this? Do I need to convert my whole InDesign-document into RGB or? And would I do that? It's easy to change in Photoshop, but not in InDesign.
I'm simply frustrated, since it cannot be so, that my pdf needs to contain murky pictures, when they, on their own outside InDesign, look perfectly fine!
Sorry about that last bit - it's how I feel.
Thank you on beforehand anyone!
Best regards,
Odin Monje

Answer 1

Because InDesign is used for professionally printed output on printing presses you need to be very careful about how you prepare your files, particularly PDF.
Color photos are printed using CMYK inks (and on some photo printers a few other additional colors to expand the 'gamut' or range of colors that can be reproduced) and there are many, many colors that can be produced in RGB that fall outside the range of what can be produced in CMYK, especially those bright and vibrant colors you are talking about. That's a fact of life.
Are you getting satisfactory prints from Photoshop? If so, make sure that InDesign is also using the same set of color settings (you can set all the applications in the suite together from Bridge). Next make sure that your output settings are set to preserve colors (many of the preset choices convert colors to one or another CMYK color space), and be sure when printing that you reset the default "Optimized Subsampling" to "All" in the Send Data field of the graphics panel in the print dialog. This should give you the same color on your desktop printer or other digital printer that you get directly from Photoshop. When exporting PDF, also be sure that the colors are preserved, and your PDF should look good on screen or printed to the same device. Understand, though, that you may not be able to get the same saturation in print (as explained above) that you see on the screen.
There is one other complication, and that's the use of transparency and transparency effects like shadows and glows. When transparency is "flattened" you can get areas of washed out color if you are using the CMYK flattener space on RGB images, so check the flattener space under the edit menu, and if possible export to Acrobat 1.4 compatibility or higher to keep the transparency live in the PDF.
Peter