Hi All,
While saving my business card as a pdf, black seems to go grey, and Im not sure the cause of it. I don’t know whether it’s simply some settings in indesign. I suspect though because I have placed images from photoshop, the contrast of grey against black from PS is very apparent.
Has anyone come across a similar problem and knows how to fix it?
Helen
here it is I deleted my details!
Not that it has anything to do withyour issue, but you should update CS3 to the last patch, 5.0.4 to fix other bugs.
What you are seeing is the difference between the 100% K black swatch in InDesing and the Rich Blacks made of either RGB or CMYK mixes in Photoshop. Rich blacks are darker.
In order to see this on screen you need to reset your ID preferences for "Handling of Black." You want to "Display All Blacks Accurately" which will show your K-only blacks as lighter than mixed color blacks. You didn't say if you are exporting (recommended) or printing to PDF, but if printing, you should set the prefs to output all blacks as rich black to keep your type from becoming screened.
P Spier wrote:
You didn't say if you are exporting (recommended) or printing to PDF, but if printing, you should set the prefs to output all blacks as rich black to keep your type from becoming screened.
Last I checked, the output for black setting only applies to non-postscript devices. If printing to PDF you'd be going through postscript and it would have no effect.
Bob
This is a fundamental property of inks and how colors are printed, connected to how colors are handled in the different applications.
In Photoshop, to get the broadest range of shadow details, blacks and grays are built in all channels. In RGB that means they have equal or near-equal amounts of each othe the RGB components in each pixel. When converted to CMYK these colors are converted to mixes with nearly equal parts of M & Y, and slightly higher amounts of C (due to the differnces between real inks and the theorectical) and some amount of K used to replace a portion of what would otherwise be C, M, and Y. This allows the dark colors to be printed with less total ink as well as getting darker blacks than can be achieved in CMY without K or in K alone. It also helps the blacks look "black" as opposed to muddy brown which is another difference between real world inks an color theory.
If you open the Separations Preview palette in CS3 and turn on separations, as you move your cursor over areas of your photoshop images you should see varying percentages of all the CMYK colors. If you create a frame and fill it with [Black] and hover over that you'll see only 100% K in the separations. This is normal and expected, but it does throw new users for a loop sometimes. In order for your photoshop file and your ID file to match the blacks, either the photoshop file must use only the black channel in the cmyk image in those areas (not practical or realistic), or you must create a new "Rich Black" color mix in ID that matches the color in Photoshop and apply that instead of the default [Black] swatch. There's nothing wrong with this for large areas, but you generally want to avoid rich blacks for type or fine lines because it causes major registration headaches for the press operator.
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BobLevine wrote:
P Spier wrote:
You didn't say if you are exporting (recommended) or printing to PDF, but if printing, you should set the prefs to output all blacks as rich black to keep your type from becoming screened.
Last I checked, the output for black setting only applies to non-postscript devices. If printing to PDF you'd be going through postscript and it would have no effect.
Bob
So you would think, but experience tells me that PDF printed rather than exported, at least when choosing composite gray as the output, screens 100%k to something in the mid-to-high 90s, probably because that's the only way to differentiate between rich blacks and 100% K in a file that has both. If the output is set to color then the appearance of black setting is irrelevant.
I'll try to remember to add that caveat next time.
In this case, though, it seems the OP is exporting.
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