CMYK Black

**Turan** · 15 December 2009, 03:40 PM

It's time for the old CMYK talk again. Did the obvious search but can find what I'm looking for.

Sent something to the printers. But the complained that the text was 'rich black' i.e. not black but made from all colours.

Followed the advice of exporting in pdf/x. But they said that did not work.

Reading the post it seems XXPro is not fully CMYK complient - is this one thing wew fall down on?

Turan

**gwpriester** · 15 December 2009, 04:08 PM

Long time, Turan

Actually, I would consider a black that contains some CMY to be rich black.

I just tried exporting two black squares, one solid black and one 100% K and 25% CMY and both show up in Acrobat > Advanced > Print production > Output Preview as containing CMYK.

The square with 25% CMY appears to contain 25% of these 3 colors and 100% K.

I opened the PDF in Illustrator CS4 and the black is indeed 100K 25% CMY.

I am using Xtreme Pro 5.1.2 and I exported as PDF/X3 2003

**Turan** · 15 December 2009, 04:25 PM

Hi Gary,

Thanks for remembering me - life is busy - I still read the post from time to time, but don't get a chance to comment these days.

I'm glade you did that simple test - my document has some transparencies behind some of the text and - as per the other posts - it does indicate problems rendering CMYK if transparency is involved. But thought it unlikely as it was behind the text.

could it be because of the anti-aliasing of the text?

Turan

**Luciano** · 15 December 2009, 05:47 PM

Turan,
I suggest that you use pure 100% k for text without CMY.
Text should be set to "overprinting", (right click imagesetting)
Do not forget to put text above pictures not behind (even for transparent ones), if you want to avoid finding text converted to a bitmap.

See attached example and the pdf output (PDFx1/a).
If you can check the pdf file you will verify it is pure black covering the picture behind, leaving no "holes" in it

**Turan** · 15 December 2009, 06:34 PM

You've missed something that I can't see :-(

If I export your file as pdf - I get pure black text :-)

If I export my file having ticked "Always Overprint Black" and ticked "Print all text as shapes" (you had it ticked) - text is 4 colour :-(

I even cut and past just one para into a new doc (incase my images were interfereing) and it still outputs as 4 colour.

Can't see any other setting that you've made that is non default (oh apart from Commercial printing in the pdf export).

What is the last magic step?

Turan

**Luciano** · 15 December 2009, 07:21 PM

Turan,
the first important step is to choose a CMYK color for your text (exactly 100%K 0%C,M,Y).
Look at the color bar (bottom) in my file, you will find a full set of CMYK colors ( and gray as percentage of black), not the usual ones provided by Xara; select all your text and click on black.
You can check with the eyedropper that it is full black.

I was surprised that even in newsletter templates provided with the software Xara used RGB black for text.

**Turan** · 15 December 2009, 07:44 PM

You're a star. I was going mad on this one - I could copy your text and CTRL-A on to mine and it would work - that explained it!

And appologies, your first line told me what to do, but I did not understand what that meant.

Thanks very much - the newspaper print deadline was 3pm uk time, so I missed it, but they took the mixed image and I know for next time.

Turan

**gwpriester** · 15 December 2009, 10:17 PM

Good point Luciano.

I did a further test.

One square was black from the screen palette and one square was CMY 0% K 100%.

The black square has percentages of CMYK. The CMY 0% K 100% square outputs to PDF as black only.

**Albacore** · 16 December 2009, 09:48 AM

Can I amplify what Luciano said about text, Always, always put it above everything. I learnd this the hard way placing text in a InDesign doc. Had that annoying white line where there was a bitmap tile along with awful looking text. I have just noticed were are being censored on this forum! I just type "Cr*p" and it came out **** when did this happen?

**steve.ledger** · 16 December 2009, 11:23 AM

Off-Topic comment response:

Commonly regarded obscene and offensive words are automatically censored via vBulletin software which replaces the offending characters with asterisks. Can you remember seeing obscene words appearing at TalkGraphics in the past Peter?
It is of course possible to remove all censored words from the list if you think TG members would prefer to read the intended vulgarity instead of just seeing **** and leaving it to the privacy of their own imagination