PDF colours are wrong on an iPad and iPhone – Quick Tip

There’s nothing worse than sending out a proof and realising the colours look dreadful on another screen.

You may have come across the Apple device colour mash-up conundrum. Most of your clients are probably looking at your digital proofs on an Apple device and this is where you can get colour problems. Have you ever noticed that your colours become extremely vivid and 80’s looking on an iPad?

Well, here’s the fix to that very problem.

When exporting to PDF, make sure you are converting your colours to the destination they’re ending up! Screens are RGB, devices are RGB – Considering you are working in CMYK, it makes sense to convert your colours to RGB on output.

Examples

Take a look at these examples below of a brochure cover for Bluekit Medical. These were outputted as PDF’s.

Original – (Screenshot – Indesign -OSX)

Below Left – iPhone (Screenshot – No conversion)

As you can see, the colours are way off and seem to be extremely vivid.

Below Right – iPhone – (Screenshot – Convert to Destination, Document RGB)

You can see with the right setting we are much closer to the original.

If you don’t know how to convert to destination when exporting to PDF take a look at the screenshot below showing you where to do it.

Hope this has been of some help to you, it may seem like a simple step, but it’s often overlooked.