I'm working on this design using InDesign and, with Overprint Preview
on, the outer glow on my text looks exactly the way I want it.
However, when I export to PDF from within InDesign, the glow seems to calculate differently (or maybe overlay differently?) once outside of the lion's head vector image.
Each asset is on its own layer in InDesign (the text with the effect is on top, the lion in the middle, and the background on the bottom).
It may be a bit difficult to see, but the glow is much darker over the lion and is mainly blending and masking the textured background without the same intensity of darkness it has in InDesign.
For reference, I've tried exporting with default High Quality Print settings (using no PDF standard, leaving compression at defaults, no conversion on output) and I've also tried exporting with modified High Quality Print settings (using PDF/X-4:2010 standard, convert to destination - preserve numbers on output).
Is there a setting I'm missing that will solve this?
If it helps, here is a closer zoomed crop of where the glow noticeably changes its opacity/darkness. You can see very faintly that the glow seems to be there, as in it's obscuring some of the textured background, but the intensity is suddenly missing.
I'm sure this is some wonderful quirk of print design, but I tried searching and wasn't finding the right phrases to bring up a similar question/answer.