indesign images

[amelia]

okay. this is complicated, but i'm going to try to describe...
i have a customer who pastes her graphics into layouts in different ways. the problem is that she will paste a clipart image (black and white) ontop of a solid background (lets say its a faded opacity of green). Sometimes the image's background will merge with the background that it is being laid upon. (the parts that looked white are now transpanent and green). this is the look she is going for. but sometimes she does it wrong, and instead of setting it so the (green) background shows through she adds a green fill, which show the same on the screen, but when it prints the faded opacities are layered ontop of eachother and it prints as a dark green "fill" around the image instead of lightgreen.

thing is, i fixed this before with her files, i thought it was a fluke, and i forgot now what i did then (two/three months ago). i recall something about paste into or embed... but its one of those things where you tried so many different techniques that they ALL seems familiar.

so, any clue out there?

oh, i ended up using a clip mask, because we had to go to press with them YESTURDAY, but this IS NOT the right effecct, its botchy.

[urstwile]

Can you post a screenshot of what you're trying to achieve, and what happens when it's not done correctly? I'm having some trouble visualizing what you're describing.

[amelia]

Here are images!
http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m33/midkiss/Picture2.jpg
This is what the image looks like upon being placed into the document. It is a clipart file. The green background is a screen/transparency of the pms color used throughout the document.
http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m33/midkiss/Picture3.jpg
This is what the image looks like (when printed). Note that the green fill applied to the image box combined with the background fill to create a darkened box around image. (bad)
But...On screen it looks like this: http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m33/midkiss/Picture1.jpg
which is how it is supposed to print.
That is if I remembered how to do it...
do you know?

[Rocketpig]

My first suggestion would be to smack your client in the head and teach her how to do it properly. If she takes the time to add a fill to the image, it wouldn't take any more effort for her to make the background transparent. That would fix the problem.

In short, I don't know a shortcut to fix the file if it's already done that way. I've never run into the problem so I haven't researched it (it's been a few years since I did pre-press).

[Rocketpig]

BTW, if she doesn't want to cut out the background, if she worked in CMYK in Photoshop and matched the background CMYK code to the swatch she's using in InDesign, it should match perfectly. I have done that before.

[amelia]

She wants the background of the image the screened PMS green.
I am searching for a way to "embed" the image into the background. To maintain the black vector clipart and allow the clipart white bg to "go away".

[PrintDriver]

what format is the clipart image?
Tif, Photoshop eps, vector eps, or bmp (if it's a bmp saved as a tif you'll have to look under Image>Mode to check that)

[Sphinx]

Convert images to grayscale tifs. Place into your document. Then colorize the box to the same background color. You can color the image anyway you wish. I've had to place logos into some ads this way. Could not totally convert to bitmap since the logos had gray tones in them.

[amelia]

printdriver- i'm not infront of the work right now, i think that it is a jpg.

sphinx- i think that the technique that you describe is at the root of the problem. as in the above image when a trans. fill of the required pms color is used in the image box a darker shade of the pms color prints. i'm not sure why...

i feel like such a goof because i have fixed it before and was going to teach her how to fix it herself, decided against it as i didn't have the time to be told off (sometimes that happens when customers don't understand why the thing doesn't print JUST LIKE they saw it on their screen, or off of their desktop printer!) . But i didn't even write the solution down for future use! goof!!!!

[urstwile]

Hmm, maybe place the image in a separate picture frame over the green, and choose Darken or Multiply for the frame that contains the image. I think that should solve the problem.

Feel free to PM me, maybe you can send me the file with the image problem and I can figure it out. I think there's something I'm missing from your description.