Group, I just got CS4 and I am working in RGB and when I hit D to set default colors the black is not black... It is a dark grey. Basically the same if you take something that is black in a CMYK document and paste it into an RGB document. The black becomes gray. Can't figure out what color setting to change to set blacks as "Rich Black." Under Edit - Preferences - Appearance of black, it is set to Rich Black.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'm sure the OP is aware of what the "D" key does - hence his question.
The question refers to figuring out how to make the black that goes into the stroke swatch when you press "D" RGB 0,0,0 rather than RGB 35,31,32.
The answer is to change the colour inside the Black swatch. If you look at your Swatches palette, you will see that the fourth swatch in is Black. By default, Illustrator ships with this Black being equivalent to CMYK 0,0,0,100, which makes sense if you're working in CMYK a lot.
If you find yourself doing web work and you wish to change the default Black to RGB 0,0,0 just edit this swatch colour.
To do this on a one-off basis (you have to repeat this for each document), then just double-click the swatch in the Swatches palette and edit the colour. It's not a Global colour swatch by default, so this will NOT change any existing items in your document that have been filled with that colour. However, if you press "D" now on your keyboard, your default stroke will get set to RGB 0,0,0 black.
If you're doing this often, you'll want to set this up as your default colour going forward - every time you open a new document. To do this, you need to edit the default document profile. This process is outlined in Adobe KB article documented here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/400/kb400732.html
But for convenience, I'm reposting the information (note these are an AI CS3 instructions, so be sure to check for your version):
To create a custom document profile in Illustrator CS3:To create a custom New Document Profile
Thank you for the detailed response. I found that the only way I could resave any existing gradients with black so that they re-opened with a proper 0,0,0 rgb black was to delete the gradients and recreate them from scratch for the new document profile. Maybe I missed something.
This whole black issue is very annoying. And print-centric.
I was starting from modifying the "Basic RGB" new document profile. The black swatch in that profile is rgb 0,0,0 but not the basic black gradient that opens in the swatches panel.
The black gradients are made with that black in which the RGB numbers are around 30. I couldn't get it to stick at 0,0,0 black in the gradient swatch for a new profile until I actually deleted the gradient and built it from scratch.
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