Workfront proofing Color PDFs showing colors differently

[Rebecca_B_Smith]

I have a user/designer creating files with many transparent gradients. They are complaining that the color in Workfront Proofing is not the same as the proof in Acrobat. I don't believe there are admin settings in Workfront proofing to change color settings. Does anyone have any suggestions? I recommended exporting at PDFX-4 pdf because they work better for files with lots of transparency, but the source files are RGB. 

[RandyRoberts]

Are these InDesign files?

I've had the same issue twice now. They fixed it once in March 2021 (Case #00300854)and then it broke again in June 2021 so they fixed it again (Case #00258547). You should open a ticket and cite these 2 cases.

Here is an excerpt of one of the support convos:

"I went into Illustrator and created a PDF using the sRGB settings and it looked fine, so I exported the PDF RGB settings from Illustrator to a PDF preset. I went to InDesign and used the preset that worked in Illustrator to export a PDF in InDesign. I created a proof from that and the colors are washed out like a CMYK view.

It seems as if PDF exports from all other apps work fine, but any PDF from InDesign is washed out no matter what settings are used. I checked the InDesign PDF in Acrobat and there is no CMYK at all, everything is RGB.

If I save it out as an EPS from InDesign and then run it through distiller with RGB preset, it still looks bad."

[Rebecca_B_Smith]

Yes, these are InDesign files. I will add a support ticket and reference your case numbers. Thank you.

[RandyRoberts]

I have a 22MB zip file that contains all my testing files from InDesign in both CMY and RGB to illustrate the problem, and test the solution. If you need them I can get them to you.

[andye3477008]

We have the same issue which has been reported, for us not all pdfs are affected, it's looks like it's to do with proof generation, this creates tiled jpg images for it renders quicker.

For testing we uploaded a jpg instead of a pdf and no colour differences were found, we can do this for one of our departments but the others rely on pdfs.

We were told that it is being worked on but that was over a year ago no.

[RandyRoberts]

I have found that if I do some initial testing to make the problem 100% repeatable, the engineers will react with a bit more urgency. This way they don't have to figure it out. I know, I know, they SHOULD have to figure it out but that's the way the world works.

When you say "not all PDFs are affected", if you figure out what is the actual difference between one that works and one that doesn't, I would bet support and engineering will take it more seriously and resolve the issue faster.