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I'm very unfamiliar with the color profile settings in InDesign. Most of the images in what I'm trying to export were pulled from the web. (Clearly, I'm not the most advanced user).

When I export the document as a PDF, the colors don't show up how they show up in InDesign. When I look online, I find a lot of information about how to make Photoshop compatible with InDesign and have the colors show up the same in both places.

I understand that InDesign is production-level software, but is there any straightforward way to export a PDF that looks like what I see on the screen in InDesign. Whenever I try different "destination" color profiles in the export window, some images show up fine, and other colors are distorted worse than before.

Other information:

Color settings: enter image description here

Even colors on the same page don't show up the same (that's the same shade of blue in both): enter image description here enter image description here

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  • Check your document color settings - the default may be CMYK. In addition, check if your PDF Export is not set to convert to CMYK.
    – Jongware
    Nov 16, 2015 at 1:15
  • @Jongware Just added color setting info to original question. It looks to me like the documents using both CMYK and RBG, but maybe I'm missing something.
    – sinθ
    Nov 16, 2015 at 1:28
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    Possible duplicate of Why are my printed colors duller than expected? It's VERY obvious you're using RGB that is then converted If your project is from printing, use ONLY CMYK and go convert all the images color to CMYK in Photoshop. Also see this, precisely the part about "Conversion during export": graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/63135/…
    – go-junta
    Nov 16, 2015 at 1:41
  • @go-meek Does that also explain the random brightening of the same color?
    – sinθ
    Nov 16, 2015 at 1:48
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    @go-meek, now the images are all fine (great!). However, the blues are still different. What's odd is those blues are not images: they're CMYK colors defined by swatches and applied to frames. What's more strange: different programs will show either both of them bright, one of them bright, or both of them the correct color (all of the blues on the same page are always the same color, but between pages, they vary hugely).
    – sinθ
    Nov 16, 2015 at 2:23

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