Printer color adjustments...

[Jsk]

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to adjust the color of *.pdf printouts? I've got a Brother laser printer and while most of the colors it printed for the USS Baltimore are fine, the lower portion of the hull plating is not very close to the red I'd like it to be. It's VERY brown. If the model was in *.svg or even a raster format I could edit the files. But with a *.pdf the only idea I can come up with is to adjust the color balance of the printer. But I'm not sure that's even possible.

 

Ideas?

 

TIA

[Jsk]

I should probably mention I'm using a Linux system in case anyone has any software solutions.

[Gabek]

I don't have any familiarity with Linux versions - but the print dialogue in Adobe Acrobat has color management tools in the Advanced Print settings.  Check the advanced tools in the software you're using to print PDFs to see if they have an equivalent. 

Hope this helps,

Gabe

[GrandpaPhil]

I have painted kit parts in the past.

 

It works best with card to seal the parts first, before painting.

[Dr PR]

There are several photo editing programs for Linux. GIMP is the one that comes to mind - I think it has been around for some time, Some of these raster image editors can import and export PDF images.

[Jsk]

OK....

 

Thanks for the tips, everyone.

 

One of the great things in Linux world is that you're not tightly tied to 'approved' programs. Of course, that's often balanced out by similar programs producing vastly different results.

 

I was hoping that I'd find a program that would open the model *.pdf in *.svg format. I found several but they all seemed to have some type of issue. The first was an open source SVG editor called 'Boxy SVG'. Boxy could open the entire *.pdf and edit it successfully, but saving was incredibly slow (took 20+ minutes) and it simply would not print the file. Even when I saved the file it seemed to default to Letter size and since the original was designed for A4 that was a problem. Next up I tried both Inkscape and GIMP. GIMP converted the file to raster format which, frankly, was not what I wanted (nor did it look very good). If no other options remained, maybe workable. Inkscape simply crashed. As did LibreOffice Draw. However, I was suspicious that the crashes might be caused by the file size.

 

So I tried opening the file in a program called PDFMod. Using PDFMod I was able to remove the pages of the PDF that I did not want to modify and re-saved it. After removing the extra pages I was able to open the file in Inkscape (and LibreOffice) and successfully alter the fill color of the lower hull sections. (There were other import settings in Inkscape that I had to tweak too--but I don't remember exactly which ones. I did have to substitute fonts since the original pdf used fonts which are not installed on my machine.) LibreOffice had issues keeping the graphical layers in the correct order but Inkscape seemed to handle everything as expected.

 

Anyway... long story short, back to building. Original color on the left. New color on the right.

[GrandpaPhil]

Excellent!