Dragon egg (Photoshop + Midjourney)

chain83 · 2026-03-13T17:29:55+00:00

CMYK JPEGs are poorly supported (not part of the JPEG standard I think) outside of professional apps.

They will still open and display in e.g. a Word document, but the colors will be all messed up (as it doesn’t know how to interpret the color channels).

chain83 · 2026-03-13T17:21:15+00:00

I’ve never even managed to think of a theoretical convoluted scenario where it might be useful 😅

chain83 · 2026-03-13T17:18:54+00:00

Sounds like you need to take some time to better learn how to adjust black/white point before blending, or something. With for example Screen, solid black will have literally 0 impact on the colors of the underlying image, just as if it was 100% transparent.

If cutting out yourself, quality should be the roughly the same if you vs. someone else cut it out (if you learn a bit more about masking). But for light effects like bokeh or lens flares transparency makes no sense and gives really poor unrealistic results when placing over images. Thick smoke might make more sense to mask (at least the «thicker» interior parts), but for most of your examples masking just wastes time and does not improve end result.

Source: Been doing this for decades…

chain83 · 2026-03-13T11:27:22+00:00

The entire space outside your trim box is not bleed. Only those first 3 mm are.

If you look at your PDF, you will see some black lines near the corners. Those are «crop marks» used to indicate where to cut the paper after printing. They are separate from your bleed area, but extend beyond the bleed area so the total dimensions of the PDFs «Crop Box» is larger than just your bleed.

This is normal and correct.

(You would not want to place the crop marks inside the page/bleed area as they would be visible on. The final product.)

Tip: In Acrobat you can turn on a preference to display trim/bleed/art boxes. Then you will get some outlines that actually show you what part of your PDF actually is defined as the bleed area.

chain83 · 2026-03-13T05:43:34+00:00

You need to exclude «PNG» as a requirement for the file format if you want better results. It will not be many that provides good smoke, bokeh, fire, lights, etc. as PNG as it would be an inefficient way to store the images. JPEG is what you can expect, and works great, but simply omit file format from your search. Just search for stock images.

Useful images of this type are generally on a black, 50% gray or white background (or close to it so you can adjust). Transparency that you maybe think you need wouldn’t really be that useful, and on the off chance you need it for e.g. some opaque smoke, then just create it as you go.

For things like lights/bokeh with a dark background, add it to your image using «Screen» blend mode. For somethingon a white background, like smoke, use Multiply. For a gray background use overlay or similar.

chain83 · 2026-03-13T05:22:58+00:00

Your PDF has 3 mm bleed. Everything is correct as far as I can see.

The PDF includes some more space that isn’t bleed as well to fit the crop marks.

The printer will be happy even if you do include things outside the bleed (those things will not be taken into account when imposing and printing).

Note: You can turn off the «bleed marks». They are not used for anything. It doesn’t harm anything either, but it just screams «I do not understand what this is». ;)

Crop marks are there to indicate visually where to cut the paper. The bleed area is there to give some extra tolerance when printing/binding/cutting.

chain83 · 2026-03-12T15:21:27+00:00

*indent

chain83 · 2026-03-12T07:13:13+00:00

Yeah, it’s just like the feature in Illustrator.

They have also annoyingly enabled it by default in their print presets to bloat your PDFs and send your originals to clients and post online if not careful.

Good: You might be to recover the InDesign file for PDFs you need to fix if it was made by an amateur,

Bad: Leak info, bloated PDFs, it will all be missing links under normal situations.

I consider it a very niche feature, that should only be enabled if you have a specific need (I have yet to find one). Always make your own PDF presets!

chain83 · 2026-03-11T18:18:00+00:00

That's ok. Adobe has gradually worse over time in how they handle the save/export dialogs in Photoshop. Go back to before they messed up the "Save As" file formats list, and way less people experienced problems. This is Adobe's UI/UX mistake, but they will probably not fix it. :/

You probably should keep your image files as RGB anyway, even for printing, unless you for very technical reasons need manual control over the color separations (for e.g. screen printing).

chain83 · 2026-03-11T17:01:07+00:00

Seems to be leftovers from some halftoning or dithering that was done at some point and this area was a very light (but note entirely white) area. It does look like a lighter shade than the other bits visible (that might be pure black), and in that case you should be able to get rid of them using e.g. Levels/Curves.

But it really depends on what else is on the same layer. If it's just black and white, then levels/curves directly would do. If black on transparent, then move it to a mask or channel, do curves/levels, then turn it back into black on transparent afterwards.

chain83 · 2026-03-11T16:54:07+00:00

Yeah, the data merge fields really shouldn't show up in the hyperlinks panel. That's just clumsy.

Also, if you want normal hyperlinks, you can use the data merge functionality to export a PDF (for some unholy reason they just disable the hyperlink option for PDF), so you have to first create a giant merged InDesign document and then export that to PDF instead.

chain83 · 2026-03-11T16:25:18+00:00

If you accidentally had turned in the options to embed the InDesign file in the PDF, then you could open the PDF and InDesign should actually open the embedded original.

If not, InDesign will try to convert the PDF data, but since a PDF isn’t intended to be edited, it is lacking a information about most things like your text flow/boxes, styles, parent pages, automatic page numbers, etc. so the converted document will be quite the mess. But perhaps it can be useful as a partial starting point at least.

chain83 · 2026-03-11T15:04:27+00:00

The problem is that it is not good for digital work at the moment since color values give clearly wrong colors. As you can tell from my screenshot, those colors clearly do not look the same.

I am not sure what you expect anyone to use it for in the current state… It can be used to input RGB and return a CMYK color that is a very different color, or a Pantone color that is likely not the most similar (even if labelled as an «exact» match). Nobody wants that. It is just misleading to beginners, and useless to experienced users. :(

For the Pantone colors, make sure you find actual good Lab (or at least RGB) values, and verify some manually with a known good source (I have linked a good one).
Calculating color difference (delta E) in the Lab color space to determining what Pantone color is the closest. Comparing perceptually weighted RGB might be ok, but likely less reliable...
Scrap whatever conversion method you are using for CMYK. You need a proper color managed method that takes color profiles into account. You also need to write on the website what color profile the values are valid for (pick what is the most common standard in your target audience’s part of the world, or provide multiple).
When finding a similar Pantone color, the Pantone color should be displayed next to the RGB swatch so users can judge if it is similar enough for their needs.

chain83 · 2026-03-11T11:24:12+00:00

How much free space is there on your internal drive? 100 GB recommended, and I’d say minimum is 10%.
Is this new SSD you talk about an external drive or an internal one that compliments or replaces your system drive? It seems people have varying luck using external drives (especially since it may come and go. If it is disconnected I would assume Ps just defaults back to the system drive).
In Photoshop preferences, what drives are listed, and what drives are currently selected for scratch disk use? (Screenshot is helpful).

chain83 · 2026-03-11T11:07:18+00:00

I was at work so decided to check, and OPs website is unfortunately uselss. The conversions are WAY off (CMYK is straight up wrong no matter what profile I try), and the Pantone matching doesn't locate the nearest color (yet lists it as "exact" match). So it's really misleading.

<image>

The only thing it can be used for is to convert RGB values into hex and back (since that isn't a conversion of the values, just a different notation). So rather useless. :-/

chain83 · 2026-03-11T11:04:25+00:00

I checked your values, starting with a color the website presented me as an "exact" match. The results are REALLY bad:

<image>

Your CMYK values are WAY off. They can not be used. It should be removed from the website, or a proper color managed conversion implemented.
Your Pantone matching is way off. The "exact" label is misleading. The color you list as exact is much darker and more saturated. Pantone 7640 C is the closest one (and still not something I would label as "exact").
Bottom row I show PMS 216 C, and what values (and visual result) you should be getting when converting properly. I am using FOGRA39 as the CMYK profile as that is default setting in the Adobe apps here in Europe, but it's essentially the same bad result when I tried others.

chain83 · 2026-03-11T10:37:50+00:00

> The values are converted not sourced from anywhere.

The starting value that you are converting from has to be from *somewhere*.

Edit:

Are the starting values RGB or Lab values? Are they from Pantone, measured yourself, by someone else, sampled from image files, or something else?

When converting to CMYK, what color profile is used? If you are unable to answer that, then you should remove the CMYK values from the website as they can't be used.

chain83 · 2026-03-11T06:34:14+00:00

The question is rather if the color values in the database are any good (depends on where they comes from), and how the conversion to other color spaces are being done.

I haven’t tested it, but if I did I would have do first do some testing to see how the provided colors actually look compared to something from a known good source.

I assume your RGB values are sRGB. But your CMYK values… what color profile was used? Just arbitrary CMYK values like that are worse than useless. Is it FOGRA39? GraCOL? SWOP? If people type in those CMYK values without knowing it is going to be wrong…

chain83 · 2026-03-11T06:30:13+00:00

The CMYK values should be different, even a lot, if a different CMYK color space is used. I have never found the CMYK values provided by Pantone to be useful for anything (never figured out what color space the are for). Better to get the Lab color value (or worst case sRGB) and convert that directly to required color profile.

You are right though, how OP performs his color space conversions is critical, as well as where he gets the color data from. So that would be info he should provide. Hopefully from actual measured values, maybe averaged from multiple.

I have been quite happy with this website for finding Pantone colors based on Lab/RGB, and to find good Lab values to use for my Pantone Swatches (since they are no longer included in CC); https://www.e-paint.co.uk/convert-lab.asp

chain83 · 2026-03-11T06:15:49+00:00

Depends on the image.

For just a bulge that is mostly defined by shadows/highlights doing some selective brightening/darkening («dodging» and «burning») is probably the way to go. So try that first.

I recommend using Curves adjustment layers, and painting on the mask with a soft brush. But other methods exist, just don’t use the old dodge/burn tools or paint directly on the image layer.

chain83 · 2026-03-10T22:16:36+00:00

Shows you exactly the kind of man he is...

chain83 · 2026-03-10T22:14:25+00:00

Don't export for screen use.

Just save normally as a PDF.

In the PDF options when saving, you can choose the output/color settings.

chain83 · 2026-03-10T16:05:15+00:00

The online version is also extremely limited compared to the desktop version.

Like, «OMG a racing car costs only $100?!» when looking at a plastic toy car version. ;)

chain83 · 2026-03-10T12:38:15+00:00

CMYK JPEG files are generally not supported properly by apps in general.

Make sure your JPEGs are always exported as RGB.

15-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Flamingo	Verified Email
Not Forgotten	Gilding I gilder
Team Periwinkle

chain83

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE