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• • April 13, 2011 at 3:02 am #59238
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I've been struggling with some very rich black images for some ads in a magazine with an RGB workflow in InDesign CS5. For a solution I simply picked the Iso Coated 300% profile (european profile) which reduces the maximum ink coverage to 300%. I'm wondering if that would be generally the best solution to use a profile for such a case or if I should use a CMYK workflow to filter out the CMY color seperations in Photoshop manually?

  • April 13, 2011 at 6:15 am #59240
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    What do you mean by “struggling”? Is it that they are too dark? Or that you are getting too much ink coverage?

    Whether you apply the profile in InDesign (upon export to PDF) or in Photoshop (using edit > convert to profile) you will get the same results.

  • April 13, 2011 at 3:26 pm #59254
    Alan Gilbertson

    Participant

    RGB black converts to a >300% rich black no matter how you handle it. If it's a problem, a quick fix is to bring the image into Photoshop and raise the black output “floor” to 5 using Levels. That brings the RGB 0,0,0 to CMYK conversion below 300% ink coverage while maintaining good contrast.

    An Adobe RGB or ProPhoto image is very often outside the gamut of CMYK process colors, so you may want to do other tweaks for best quality in any individual project. It's a good idea to confer with your printer's (or magazine publisher's) prepress department to find out what they prefer, and to get a contract proof before committing to press. A publication often has a .joboptions file (Distiller preset) that you can simply drop into your Acrobat settings folder, which pretty much eliminates the worries.

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