The Logo That Printed Muddy
A client supplies a logo as a PNG with a transparent background, 600 × 200 px at 72 ppi, in RGB. You place it on a business card at 40 mm wide. On the digital proof the logo looks fine, but on the offset press proof the edges are soft and the red appears dull and slightly shifted against the adjacent cyan panel. The card also has a vector wordmark placed as an EPS. The printer's preflight flags the PNG as 'effective resolution 180 ppi' and the color space as RGB. The card is 85 × 55 mm with 3 mm bleed.
1. Diagnose the soft edges and the dull red, and state what you would request from the client versus what you can fix in InDesign.
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Soft edges: The PNG is 600 px wide placed at 40 mm. 40 mm ≈ 1.575 in, so effective resolution is 600 / 1.575 ≈ 381 ppi at 100% - but the preflight reports 180 ppi, meaning the frame was scaled up (the image is being enlarged in the layout). At 180 ppi it's below the 300 ppi target for offset, and PNG is a raster format, so edges soften when scaled. Fix in InDesign: reduce the placed size or use Object > Fitting correctly, but you cannot add real resolution. Request a vector version (AI, EPS, or PDF) from the client.
Dull red: The PNG is RGB. When exported to a CMYK PDF, InDesign converts RGB to CMYK using the document's color profile, and a saturated RGB red often maps to a muddy CMYK red. Fix: request the logo in CMYK with the printer's ICC profile, or convert deliberately using Edit > Convert to Profile with the correct output intent and check the result. The adjacent cyan panel is likely a CMYK swatch, so the mismatch is a color-space mismatch, not a rendering intent issue.
2. The vector wordmark EPS imports with a white box behind it. What are the likely causes and the correct fix?
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Likely causes:
- The EPS was saved with a white background rather than transparency - common when exported from vector editors that flatten.
- The EPS contains a clipping path that isn't being honored, or the frame has a fill applied in InDesign.
- The EPS uses spot colors that don't match the document swatches, and the white is actually a paper-colored object.
Diagnostic steps:
- Select the frame and check the Fill in the Swatches panel - set to None if a fill was applied.
- Open the EPS in a vector editor to inspect for a white rectangle.
- Use Object > Clipping Path options if the EPS has an embedded path.
Fix: request a transparent vector file (AI or PDF with no background), or recreate the white box removal in the source. In InDesign you can also apply a clipping path, but the cleanest fix is a corrected source file. Verify the EPS colors against the document swatches so the wordmark and logo match on press.