PDF viewing: Color (Patreon)

Just a quick note as I finalize the latest Episode of grOw/cinema 1.

While finishing up the PDF and optimizing its size, I noticed a huge difference in color from one PDF viewer to another. Plus, having 2 monitors, there also another shift in color from monitor to monitor.

This is quite common, and a bane to graphic designers worldwide — consistent color across screens. It's basically impossible, since all monitors have different qualities, color ranges and gamuts, brightness, personal user settings, etc.

I will say, in my experience, if you want the best color as I intended, you can "influence" your experience by using Acrobat Reader (a free download from Adobe) for viewing my cinema PDFs. Now, there are still all those monitor settings I mentioned above that will also affect your PDFs' color, but at least Acrobat tries to maintain some of the original color profiles.

Above is a screen shot from my computer — side-by-side comparison of the same PDF file, shown in Apple's Preview app (left), and Adobe Acrobat (right).