Eps v tiff

[Risca]

I have a supplied greyscale pic saved as eps. It looks good on screen especially in InDesign high quality display mode, which is supposed to show pic as it will rip. However it has come out very 'washed out' on the plate, ie. the dots have lightened by by a huge amount (say 50% becomes 20%, etc). When I save the image as a tiff. Everything is fine. Plate looks great, just like it displays on screen. Can anyone explain this, and do you normally use eps or tiff for your greyscale images. Would you routinely changed eps tiff? Thanks for any help.

[Vinny]

As far as my end goes I normally go with .tiff for any raster images. Use .eps whenever vector images are involved. Lately with vector clip art I import these into photoshop with a 600 dpi resolution and save as a .tiff because it's so much easier to trap. I'm talking 50 images here. We don't have fancy trapping software and our rip isn't too fancy either. I haven't noticed any difference with the .eps clip art and the .tiff clip art myself. Even with and without profiles involved. :lol:

[Seth]

There may be some embbed color mangement proflies in the EPS files, or some other tone conversion going on in the file interpretation prior to the plate imaging.

Have I mentioned how much I hate embbed color management profiles??

[cari]

Few reasons this could happen.

One (as mentioned already), the image might have an incorrrect output profile attached to it, which re-renders the pixel information

The other could be that the image was saved with a transfer function attached to it ( A curve applied at print-level to correct for print colour differences).

When saving as EPS from Photoshop, don't tick Include Transfer or Halftone functions.

If you're using InDesign as your page layout application, save the files in native Photoshop or PDP (Photoshop PDF) format.

[Risca]

Thanks for your input, but this image has no profile attached and no transfer function. The job was actually printed, even though the printed image from the plate was much lighter than the proof. Now the customer wants to know why. And I don't know!!

[dimitri]

try in the coloursettings.

click on advanced mode and check if you have the desaturate button clicked. but this should display it washed out but print ok.

but there should be no output difference between eps and tif

cheers dimitri

[T-Rex]

Even before profile-based color management, there have always been some noted color differences between EPS and TIFF (without transfer functions, etc.). You can print out a version of both from the same file and see some difference (albeit slight).

And even though you may not have knowingly embedded a profile, one may have been in it. To know for sure you want to find an AppleScript in one of the ColorSync folders (on OS 9 it is in the Apple Extras folder) that extracts color profiles from any file you place on it.

The other thing, there is also a check box in the EPS save dialog that speaks of PostScript color management. Could that have been checked when the file was saved?

Your situation does sound like something, perhaps in the RIP config?, is compensating for dot gain differently for EPS files than for TIFF...