Summary: Have to print several PDF's coming with dark, dull colors, the printed result is very dark and often bleeding ink. I can compensate easily using the printer's color adjustment on Canon Printers (brightness, intensity, contrast, etc), that's awesome but I can't do the same on HP printers as there is no color adjustment. I'm not producing the PDF's so my options are limited, I just receive the files, educating the customers to produce quality PDF is sadly out of the question.
I would like to find a way to adjust the colors on the PDF itself and keeping it as PDF or saving it as a new one, also keeping the lines (raster) and pixels. Is there a way to do this? I would love having a virtual PDF printer with color adjustments (just like canon printers), so I could send this PDF's to print and save, getting a new color adjusted document.
Details on what I have achieved so far with limited results:
- Open in Photoshop and adjust. Perfect, I can do whatever I want but the whole page is converted into pixels, I don't want that. Besides this only works page-by-page and I'm working with 500 page documents so this is not a practical option.
- XNConvert works great and converts each page into whatever format I want also applying filters like brightness and contrast, etc, but it also converts everything into pixels. Despite experimenting diff configurations, it causes issues with fine lines (0.5 or hairlines are turned into 1pt lines).
- IrfanView also works great just like XNConvert but it messes up the text, can't recognized the embedded fonts and also converts everything into pixels, I don't want that.
- PrintFab (RIP software) is the best thing I have tried in this sense but still with limitations. Yes it works great and I can adjust brightness, contrast, etc while keeping everything as a printjob (pixels and raster) but it doesn't have full support for the family of HP printers I have, the end result is it makes the printer work in CMY mode, without blank ink.
- Old Macromedia Freehand could import some PDF documents and allowed manual color adjustments affecting both images and line objects while keeping them as they are (without turning everything into pixels), but it doesn't work with all PDFs (importing, that is), and it's a pain with multipage PDFs.
- I have worked with ImageMagick in the past but not in this way, I believe the available options would also turn lines into pixels.
- Currently exploring the Adobe Acrobat convert color options but suddenly stopped working, will keep trying.
I worked on the printing industry for years and we often received terrible PDF files for printing magazines, but the specialized RIP software allowed great freedom of modifications on color and profiles. I can't achieve the same on HP printers so far, and using ICC profiles has great limitations in regard of my problem (bad pdfs from clients).
After lots of research it seems I would have to give up my HP equipment and buy Canon, Epson or Brother so I can get access to full printing color adjustments on the fly but that's not a realistic option for me right now (BTW I'm talking about printing lots, lots of pages).
I must be missing something here, there must be another way to do this. Any help will be appreciated.
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