Can anyone help us with issues we are having creating a custom cover for a CreateSpace book?
We are having a lot of issues creating a custom cover for a CreateSpace book. If anyone can help us, it will be greatly appreciated : ) Below is a description of the issue from the person who is doing the cover:
I created the cover in Photoshop (CS4) based on the Create Space template for a 140-page book. I used layers for the various background graphics and layers for each section of the text including the titles on the front cover, the title and author on the spine and the text on the back cover. The bottom layer was white which is the background of the cover.
The color space used was Photoshop's default of 8-bit RGB color. The text on the cover was predominately black. 3 lines of text were created in royal-blue. 2 of those royal-blue lines had a small, subtle drop shadow on them.
I created the PDF from Photoshop using "save as a Photoshop PDF". It was set to save as a copy without layers in the Icc Profile: sRBG. The print quality was set to "press quality" with all options turned off ('preserve photoshop editing", etc.). The file was too large to email (27MB), so I used the "reduce the size of the document" function to reduce the file size to version 7 or newer.
When the book cover came back, all the graphics printed and were in the right place. However, the only thing that shows in the text areas is the 2 small drop shadows (from the 2 lines of royal blue text). No other text shows. My assumption is that either the text never printed or that it printed in white for some reason on the white background. All text fonts were imbedded into the document per the Create Space instructions.
Bottom line: Graphics show fine. No blue text and no black text. The only thing showing in the text areas are 2 small gray drop shadows.
Areas that seem mostly likely to be at fault:
1) I should have flattened the layers in Photoshop before creating the PDF (but the graphics were layered also and they worked fine)
2) I should have put all the text in a single layer
3) Reducing the document to version 7 and above somehow caused a print issue (have done this before on other graphic files without this result)