Ewan Main
Now and then I get sent stuff and asked to turn it into other stuff. I’m sure there are better ways of phrasing that, but this will do for my purposes. Let’s agree to overlook the wording and move on to the content, shall we?
In the spirit of “please turn this stuff into some other stuff,” I was sent a very large PDF document so that I could use some of the images in it in a web design I was working on. It’s not too tricky to extract the graphics from a PDF — I found a tip here, for example — but then I ran into a problem. Each picture I extracted had its colour and contrast almost irrevocably strangified. I tried a bit of fiddling around in Aperture but it was clearly going to be a long and laborious process.
It seemed clear enough that the problem related to colour profiles, which are something I try to avoid learning about whenever possible. (To be honest, my calibrated iMac screen, InDesign’s PDF export, and every litho printing shop I’ve used work so well together that colour accuracy has never been a problem.) All these pictures had been converted for CMYK printing, rather than the RGB I needed.
But the solution turned out to be pretty straightforward if you have Acrobat Professional and Photoshop:
- First of all, open the PDF in Acrobat Pro.
- Choose Advanced – Print Production – Convert Colors.
- In the Document Colors window that appears, look for anything that mentions CMYK; if it’s there, that’s your problem.
- Select it, choose Convert from the Action drop-down, and choose an RGB profile in the Destination Space box. (I used Adobe RGB 1998).
- Click OK and let it do its thing, then save the PDF. It won’t look any different at this stage, because Acrobat Professional had been converting the colours to display them on your screen anyway.
- Now open the PDF in Photoshop.
- When the Import PDF box appears, choose images (rather than pages).
- Select any or all of the pictures you want, and the pictures are imported, correctly displayed, and ready for you to enact your nefarious schemes upon them.
