LaTeX forum ⇒ General ⇒ Color problem with pdflatex and certain images

[davers]

I am using pdflatex to compile a beamer presentation with pdf images created in Adobe Illustrator included. On each of the slides with an image, the colors on parts of the slide are slightly incorrect (a darker green becomes teal for instance). The error I receive is

pdflatex (file ./RGC_BottomUpHomogenization.pdf): PDF inclusion: Page Group detected which pdfTeX can't handle. Ignoring it.

If they are converted to PNG or JPG images, the colors work properly, but the images do not look as nice.

Does anyone know the cause of this problem or how to fix it? Thank you for your time.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi davers,

welcome to the board!
Perhaps try a different reader. I've noticed color problems with the Adobe Reader, that did not occur when using Evince. I could solve it for the Adobe Reader by converting the color mode from RGB to an indexed palette, have a look here:

Adobe Reader: unwanted color change.

We had a similar discussion here.

Stefan

[davers]

Hey Stefan,

Thanks for your suggestion and welcome to the board. The output pdf looks proper in KPDF, though I am worried about Adobe because it is used on most computers. If I have to send the presentation to someone else, it will not display properly.

I tried your suggestion with success, but the images once again did not look as nice as I had hoped (GIMP can't save in pdf format). It appears to me now to be a problem of transparency, not color. The one image I had without transparency worked fine (in pdf format from Illustrator). For the others, the image displayed properly, but it looks like perhaps the transparency was being put over the rest of the slide. Flattening all of the images in either jpg or png format worked, but if the image was not flattened and transparency was retained in png format, it produced the same false colors as the pdf.

I suppose then that this would be an inherent problem with Acrobat reading the output from pdflatex. Do you think there is anything that could be done to remedy that, or will I simply have to convert my files to flattened pngs or jpgs before I use them? Thanks.

David