Working in Photoshop Gray to Indesign to PDF help..

Question

Hi,
CAN SOMEONE HELP ME save out a PDF in the final tagged color space:  Gray Dot Gain 20%
I am saving my Photoshop .tif files with embedded profile: Gray Dot Gain 20%
My InDesign Working CMYK is: US Web Coated SWOP v2
I place my .tif files in InDesign.
What is confusing me is InDesign's no Gray settings.
My first Question is TARGETING my PDF to the desired print space:  Gray Dot Gain 20% — THERE IS NO GRAY CONVERSION OPTION!
As my InDesign book is in Working CMYK, and my placed .tif files are in Gray Dot Gain 20% — I have determined I will need to Convert to my print profile in Acrobat — but what would be the best Adobe PDF Preset setting to get my tagged CMYK and tagged Gray into a PDF so I can Convert Colors to Dot Gain 20% in Acrobat?
No Gray support in In Design has be baffled — I am thinking I should avoid Gray all together and just feed InDesign RGB to be sure InDesign passes through my .tiff profile to Acrobat...

Answer 1

Thanks, I read Petteri's and Peter's replies very carefully.
InDesign treats grayscale images as being on the K plate of the CMYK
working space.
That is enlightening, yet I do not understand what it means (K v. Dot Gain 20%) — I simply want a PDF properly Converted and tagged with the "Gray Dot Gain 20%" ICC profile.
Apparently InDesign CS4 cannot pass through Gray Dot Gain 20% properly tagged as such?
And I will need to follow through Converting to my target print space inside Acrobat.
I say this because, in my InDesign Export PDF process, I choose to do No Color Conversions, Embed and Preserve Profiles — then I use Acrobat Output Preview> Object Inspector to verify the profiles.
My first tagged Gray Dot Gain 20% image reads "DeviceCMYK" in Object Inspector.
The remaining 50 or so tagged Gray Dot Gain 20% images read "DeviceGray".
This inconsistancy is really weird because my images are all the same tagged Gray Dot Gain 20% going into InDesign.
All my text in my 100-page book reads as "DeviceCMYK" in Object Inspector.
I cannot follow that logic (what happened to my profiles and why is my top image now reading as untagged CMYK?).
If I then use Acrobat Convert Colors "Convert to Profile> Dot Gain 20%> Embed profile — then Acrobat's Object Inspector reads all my images and text as "ICCBasedGray Dot Gain 20%" as desired.
with greyscale images, I create them in photoshop and embedd grey
icc-profile into them while saving. Then I place them to Indesign and
when I export PDF, I choose a CMYK profile
A PDF Conversion would always need to be based on a Source Profile(s) — the mystery is — if InDesign's Export PDF process is not tagging my images properly, then HOW can it make a proper follow-up Conversion to my print space?
The only hope I have of making sense of this is if I can follow the color management chain and end up in the desired tagged print space.
+++++++
In my four previous books, I've Placed my tagged Gray Dot Gain 20% images in InDesign, Exported to PDF to No Color Conversions, Embed and Preserve Profiles, and handed off CMYK PDFs (apparently based on my Working CMYK profile).
Those printed beautifully, but I am trying to learn and it makes sense I could Convert my PDF to the 100% print space.
+++++++
It is possible to convert your CMYK PDF to Dot Gain 20% in Acrobat, but I
was not happy with the appearance on screen the last time I tried it ( I
think I lost my 100% K levels)
That sounds like Acrobat was basing the Conversion on a wrong Source Profile (which is my concern for not being able to verify the profiles it is spitting out in my PDF tests).
It seems if I Converted my InDesign book to sRGB, and Converted all my Gray images to sRGB — that InDesign could Export a tagged sRGB PDF that Acrobat could Convert to Gray Dot Gain 20% (and I could follow the chain).
Then again, I wish I knew what I was doing here...