PSD Files appearing with frames on PDF

[Kelly Johnson]

What you’re seeing is referred to as “Stitching” and it occurs where a vector images butts up against a raster image…such as the actual frame in InDesign (always a vector whether stroked or not) and the imported psd file.

They will appear on the printed image if not taken care of. The short story from Adobe is that any printer worth their salt should be using a current enough RIP to properly rasterize a pdf in either X1a format.

However, if you’re creating the pdf yourself, besides using something like PitStop, the two things you can try are:
1. Open the Transparency Flattener and move the slider to the rasterize side. This will essentially make the InDesign file more of a big image rather then embedding postscript data for font files and such. If you’re going to print, there’s absolutely no reason not to do this. For a text searchable pdf however, this would hinder those pdf abilites.

2. Create the back ground of the psd file to match the area in the InDesign file. Depending on the complexity of the image, this can be an easy near bullet-proof method or a long but easy near bullet-proof method.

There is another way though. Save the file as a postscript file and rasterize the file in Photoshop so that you’re creating big image files rather than pdf files.

You can search for ‘stitching’ at Adobe help to find out more.

[Bilart]

Send a PDF with compatibility set up to Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5). Everything what’s below Acrobat 6 has problems with transparencies and layers. I’ve been doing this for about the year and never had complains from any printer. Even my PDF/X1a 2001 I’ve changed to Acrobat 6. Let’s be honest Acrobat 4 is very old format (4-5years old). I would say 99% of printers will take format 6 and you don’t have to worry about transparencies, stiching and all that Acrobat 4 stuff.

[Jonathan Bishop]

Hey Guys,

Just elaborating on bilarts post, exporting at PDF version 1.4 instead of 1.3 should also aleviate this problem and majority of printers should accept this versioning.

Cheers