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• • December 15, 2014 at 9:01 am #72232
    RWVVV

    Member

    This somehow came out of the blue for me: I’ve got ID set up to display and output ‘all blacks as rich black’ So a report I made used the black swatch (100% K) throughout the report, but after exporting the pdf (without color conversion) the blacks dont get a rich black appearance. This strikes me as somewhat odd, since this was working just fine before (last week). My best guess is Im overlooking something. Im on CS5.5. Could someone point me towards a solution to have my blacks to be output as rich black, without having to make new swatches?

  • December 15, 2014 at 11:10 am #72243
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Ordinarily, black does not convert to rich black when you export a PDF, and that’s a good thing. If you’re printing on a printing press, you don’t want fine lines and text to be in rich black most of the time.
    But it sounds as though you do want rich black. Is it just so that it looks really black on screen when you open the PDF in Acrobat?

    My guess is that you’re using a different PDF preset than before. For example, maybe you switched to PDF/X-1a, which is great for printing, but may look washed out on screen. (Acrobat is just trying to do you a favor by showing you that real printing ink isn’t truly solid black.)

    One way to force your PDF to have rich blacks is to choose Working RGB (sRGB) in the Destination pop-up menu, in the Output pane of the Export PDF dialog box. That’ll look great on screen, but you wouldn’t want to send that to a commercial printer, as everything is converted to rgb.

  • December 16, 2014 at 6:54 am #72256
    RWVVV

    Member

    Hey David,

    Thanks for your response. Oddly, my printer actually recommends sending RGB documents, since the printer used for this job is an Indigo. I don’t really ask why, but a CMYK document I had printed by them in the past looked worse than all mixed or RGB only documents I sent later.

    After some thorough examination of older documents I noticed that you were indeed correct about rich black in a PDF export. How silly of me to not notice before, however the current doc is the first with large black shapes. I’ll just go ahead and create a rich black or regular RGB black swatch (will work either way with printer) and replace em all….shouldnt be too difficult.

    I am curious though about why one wouldnt want rich black for fine lines and text on a printing press. I mean, printing 100%K will always look washed out, right?

  • December 16, 2014 at 9:15 am #72266
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    100% K typically doesn’t look washed out in text and fine lines; just in larger areas. The problem with rich black for text is that if the press misregisters even a little bit then you have “fringes” of color peeking out around the edges of the black and that ends up making fine lines/text look fuzzy.

  • December 16, 2014 at 9:39 am #72268
    RWVVV

    Member

    That does indeed make some sense. Thanks David! :)

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