Rich Black – Some kind of guideline / template?

Hi All...
There is an ongoing thread about what "Rich Black" AI uses:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/429978?tstart=0
From the posts, i gather that, forget AI, there are a lot of options based on print quality paper stock, surfacing and finishing(?).
D'you folks think it possible to put up a kind of broad charectorisation of black-ink composition depending on relevant parameters?
Look, it doesn't have to be absolutely precise but a working rule of thumb. Maybe it could be posted as a sticky faq.
JJ

Scott...
That's getting somewhere... I was thinking of a basic kind of reference chart for newbies (and others)... kind of like:
Paper
Screen
GSM
CMYK
Newsprint
xx
40 0 0 100
Newsprint
yy
40 20 20 100
Coated Stock
225
40 40 40 100
PDF for web / email
Monitor
50 40 40 100
Some kind of a generic thing that would help get people started and have the caveat to check with their printer before final output. Could be a sticky.
Think it'd be of any help or just a waste of time?

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Problem creating a swatch for rich black (c50 m50 y0 k100)

When I manually create a swatch for rich black (c50 m50 y0 k100) in Illustrator CC (17.1.0) and assign as a fill or stroke, it is getting changed back to ordinary black (c0 m0 y0 k100). That is, I create the swatch as above, select an object and click to assign the rich black swatch. The swatch appears to be assigned to objects stroke or fill as expected. However, if I then reselect that object, the rich black has been reset to the standard black – c0 m0 y0 k100. I'm sure I've done this before without a problem, but not since I upgraded to Illustrator CC. As a workaround, for the piece I'm working rigth now, I created a swatch for c50 m50 y0 k99 – as this holds. Any ideas?
Kind regards
Tim

At the time I was getting the decribed behaviour, I was working on a project destined for an online print service called PrintCarrier, for which I had a particular profile based on the FOGRA39 profile: Eurostd (Coaed) 15% GCR Medium. The latter was causing Illustrator to not retain rich blacks. When I reverted to my usual profile (ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI)) rich blacks were retained – that is Illustrator behaved normally with regards honouring the rich black assignments.
Not sure why the different profile was causing that to happen in Illustrator. I know that under the same profile in InDesign, rich blacks assigned within that application behave correctly, and don't reset as in Illustrator.
Is this a bug getting triggered or am I missing something in the way profiles handle black/rich black?
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Peter,
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Semi-transparent block, pure black and rich black problems

Hi!
I'm new to inDesign, and I'm currently designing a book cover, for which I need some special effects. I'll try to explain as best as I can.
The background is rich black, on top of it I have a text in white (all over it). I applied a block with 80% opacity, in rich black color. I cut out some shapes in it. The point was to have the text in dark gray all over the book cover, but in white in the places where I have the shapes.
Everything is working exactly like I want, but a friend of mine told me if I apply rich black over white, I'll get a kind of magenta gray, so I have to apply pure 100 K to avoid that and get the dark gray I want. I tried that, and of course, applying some pure black block on top of my rich black cover gives all the cover a "grayish black" look. How can I work around that? I tried setting my semi-transparent block to "darken", but it didn't change anything.
I put the links to the pdf, I hope that's ok.
That's the one with rich black: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/68049919/coverlayout_print_richblack.pdf
and that's how it looks with the pure black: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/68049919/coverlayout_print.pdf
Thanks a lot!

There's no need to use transparency to create your background text color—just make a text frame filled with the rich black then select the type and fill it with an 80% tint of the rich black swatch or any other gray mix. Like this:
The text frame selected with its fill showing in the Colors panel:
Here the text is selected and the Colors panel shows the text fill as an 80% tint of the rich black. There's no transparency in this case.
In general it's bad practice to use transparency when you can get the same effect with color fills.
Also if you are worried about the neutrality of the gray check with your printer on whether the gray text should be 4-color (your 80% tint) or straight black (95% black).
The accuracy of the InDesign softproof depends on an accurate monitor profile and the assigned CMYK profile (Edit>Assign Profiles...). The assigned CMYK profile affects the preview including the profiled gray balance. For example the default SWOP CMYK profile previews your 4-color dark gray bluer and as a lighter value than US Sheetfed.
The preview of your 85% rich black mix with different CMYK asignments

Rich Black

Hi. I am a black and white photographer and I'm trying to print some greeting cards. I know that I need to convert the image to rich black in order to get the richest blacks. I really don't know how to exactly do this. I've gotten the CMYK values from my printer for what their rich black is, but I'm not sure if I'm just supposed to convert my grayscale image to CMYK in photoshop and make the conversion in InDesign or if I'm supposed to do it in Photoshop? I just converted it to CMYK in photoshop and placed it in InDesign and had a test printed. The image came back with a blue tint that was not very attractive. Any help on how to exactly do this would be much appreciated, thanks!

lauren,
Often, the printer's choice was probably a blue-black (that is a black with a lot of cyan in it) is a visually attractive way to print large solid black areas. That may not work so well for photographs, unless you want a cool tone in the grayscale.
In Photoshop's cmyk color mode, the default black (when you reset the color patches in the tool palette) is a good "safe" rich black. But you can customize the kind of black you want fairly easily.
Get a hold of one of the Pantone books that shows color formulas in CMYK, such as their fanout color formula guide which gives you side-by-side comparison of pure mixed pantone colors with their closest CMYK equivalents. This is a good reference to have anyway, as you can see which Pantone colors will and which won't print properly in commercial CMYK offset printing. In any case, you can choose a black you like (warm, cool, greenish, reddish, etc.) and use the CMYK formula provided adjacent to the swatches.
You should also be using a carefully calibrated color monitor and color managed printer so you can preview results.
Now a couple of points about where to apply the color. You can, of course, do it in Photoshop. But it is a lot easier to save a greyscale .tif file. Place it in InDesign, and play with the color there. It is VERY quick and easy to swap out the color there, or run color tests from InDesign, before turning over your final art to the printer.
Hope this helps.
Neil

Rich black spot colour

hello indesigners.
can a rich black become a spot colour if i choose from process to spot colour?
and can a white or black become a spot colours or are those 2 colours considered just simple shades?
thank you.

Your answer makes me think you really don't understand process and spot colors.
First black is most certainly a color, but more importantly it is, in fact, already always on its own plate, just as Cyan, Magenta and Yellow inkls also have their own plates when building a process color.
Process inks (the regular CMYand K) are translucent and when mixed on the paper blend together to fool your eye into seeing thousands of other colors, but you cannot mix them together in a pot to make a single color to run on a separate plate. Spot color inks are opaque, and are a lot like paint. They get mixed from a set of basic color pigments and are laid down on a single plate. If you pick a page at random from a Pantone Formula Guide swatch book (the kind with 7 swatches on a page and the ink mix formula listed), you'll probably see that the center swatch is the baseline color, and the ones above it have white added, while the ones below have black added to the mix.
As has already been mentioned, Rich Black, at least using the tradtional meaning of a mix of Black and some amounts of CM and Y, is not a spot color, and you would not typically use it for type. There ARE spot black inks, but you are much more likely to want to use a spot ink for gray type or for some other color like red or green, especailly if the color does not have a good process equivalent. Light colors, especially, will print crisper as spots than as simulations, too, because they will be laid down solid instead of as screened dots.
There are cases where it makes sense to have TWO black plates. One of them is with documents that will be translated into multiple languages. In that case a second black plate can be defined as a spot color and all of the text will be assigned to that color. This allow the creation of 1 set of CMYK plates for the illustrative content, and the changing of the spot plate to change languages. This can reduce the setup time during language changeovers since the registration for text is not as critical in most cases and the CMYK plates will already have been registered on the first run. There is no advantage, though, to adding a fifth plate for black if there will not be a change in mid-run.

What "rich black" does AI use?

If I set my prefs to "Output All Blacks as Rich Blacks" what is the CMYK breakdown of this black? I usually make my own rich black, based on what kind of printing I'm doing (and set the pref to output accurately), but I was just curious what AI uses and why.

@Bernie X:
Here's some "fact", not "theory". Your printer is not printing Registration… guaranteed. They fix it and don't tell you (and don't bother calling the sales guy since he would NEVER tell you the truth of it… another guarantee.)
The interactions of ink on paper dictate a specific total ink coverage and there is not a combination (though there could be some hyper-substrate I've never seen, though unlikely - definitely not just "coated stock") that would properly withstand this level of ink saturation. Ink would be offsetting on the other sheets like mad! Even if you dried between press passes (which would add days to your print job - not economically feasible and no printer in their right mind would do it regularly) and added driers and whatnot, at a certain point ink is not going to trap properly (and I'm talking about ink-to-ink trapping).
And since you want to toss around credentials, I've been doing Prepress (conventional and electronic), running many different presses (web, offset, flexo, etc), and even bindery for 23 years, and commercial art for 30 years. I'm the guy that fixes the files people like you send in - and as a pressman I would have kicked those plates back to PrePress the minute I saw them (if they happened to get through, and as any knowledgeable pressman would do).
Just an FYI, the ISO standard for Rich Black is 50c 40m 40y 100k. This is also accepted in the GraCol7 standard though there is some anecdotal evidence that sub-Dmax Black values (ie. 93-97% Black) may actually visually appear darker in print.
PS: Your PDF can prove nothing. It's the apple, not an orange. It is a distant cousin to the plates that were on press when your job was printed. And BTW, opening your PDF it's immediately obvious that the file needs to be fixed.

Print quality of grey text on rich black background

I've been working on various print materials that require me to use a lot of grey text at various shades set on a black background. My understanding is that this can easily look terrible due to the misregrestation of the four colors. Here's an example of the kind of text I'm working with:
This is how I have things set up right now:
Rich Black Swatch: C70 M50 Y30 K100
All text uses the same swatch at various tints in InDesign (15% tint for headlines, 25% tint for body text)
Body text size is 8 pt/10.8 pt, headlines are 14 pt
These are being printed on an offset press and the printer isn't local, so we don't get proofs. Is there are better way to set this up or is this the best I can hope for? Thanks for any help!

I wonder what type of paper are you planning on using for these pages? Your total ink amount is 250. What you should be concerned about is dot gain and ink spread. Oh, nice rich Black on screen isn't so nice on press for a number of reasons. Have you thought about using a Spot Black? Why use process if all you have is Black? Unless, ofcourse, you have other elements that use process colors. You have to know the press and the paper before you can make a judgement about the effectiveness of rich Black with screen tinted variants. You could bite the bullet and let the file fly. Or, you could use just Black with screen tint variants to lesson problems on press and with readibility. No proofs? No press check either?

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Rich Black in AI CS3

I'm a long-term Freehand user so please bear with me!
OK, I've got some experience with AI but have used Freehand extensively for the past 10+ years. Decided to give AI a try via the CS3 30-day trial, since I know it will handle Freehand MX files. I've come across a problem almost straight away, however.
I noticed, when I opened an MX file in AI CS3, that all my rich blacks had been changed into 0,0,0,100k blacks - and all the 0,0,0,100k blacks had been left as they were. I can't work with that - I need a rich black and I need a 100k black. Does anyone know why this is happening, and how I can solve the problem?

No, unfortunately that makes no difference. Basically, my work files always include two blacks: the basic 0,0,0,100k black and a rich black, which Freehand always composes as 75,68,67,90. Whenever I opened a Freehand file in AI CS2, it would respect the two different blacks as I'd originally set them in the Freehand document. Opening the same file in CS3, for some weird reason CS3 is altering ALL the blacks to the same: 0,0,0,100k.
When I look at the colour swatch in CS3, whether using a brand new AI document or opening one of my Freehand files, I see two blacks listed. One labelled "black", the other labelled "K=100". However, both have an identical makeup: 0,0,0,100. That's surely not correct? The colour named "black" should surely be a rich black, not just 100k. Otherwise, what's the point of the K=100 colour?
I have to say, apart from this issue I've been impressed with AI CS3. For a Freehand user, it's much easier to work with than previous versions. I'm very tempted to make the switch, though probably to CS4 now that it's available.

Rich black gray images

I want to create a rich black, CMYK gray image. The colors must blend CMYK to make a nice gray image. It would be nice to apply GCR to remove some of the CMY and reduce the TAC. So far, I am able to make this happen. However, as a result of the GCR, the highlight areas in the photo are made up of mostly CMY. I would like to have the highlight areas made up of mostly black only. So, I want to use GCR in the mid-tone and shadow areas, but I'd like to use mostly black only in the highlight areas. Any thoughts as to how I can make this happen?

You are misunderstanding GCR. CMY in the highlights is not the result of GCR, it is the ABSENCE of GCR in those tones.
GCR is the substitution of blacK for CMY when there are combinations of the color inks in ratios that would simulate neutral gray (generally, equal amounts of C & M, and about 20% of those percentages as Y). The theory being that blacK alone can substitute for the gray that CMY can give. In practice it doesn't quite work out that way, but using black where neutral gray appears in the CMY mix up to about 50 % replacement is a good compromise.
If you are converting from RGB to CMYK, in Color Settings, set the working CMYK space to Custom CMYK, then use GCR and varying amounts of black generation to force more black replacement up into the light values of the image.
If your image is CMYK already, you'll have to do a "manual GCR by using Curves. Or, you could convert back to RGB, then control the conversion as above back to CMYK.
In either case, it's a crap shoot and you'll have to experiment and fine tune with Curves.
Rich

How to achieve rich black in exported PDF?

InDesign CS5 on Snow Leopard. I have black set to display and output accurately (not rich black). Color settings are North America General Purpose 2. Proof Setup is set to Document CMYK U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, so that I can see on the screen as accurately as possible what it will look like when printed.
A large, mostly black image covers my first page; it's an imported PSD. When I view the image in PhotoShop, it shows as 'rich black' - you know, on-screen 100% black. But when looking at it in InDesign, it appears a dull grey. It also appears a dull grey when exporting to PDF or printing it.
How do I get it to go to PDF and to print as crisp, perfect, 100% dark rich black?
If possible, I'd like it to appear on my screen roughly as it will in the exported PDF and the printed page.
Thanks!

Peter,
It isn't quite that simple. If you export PDF/X-4 or any PDF without color conversion at export, you may find that the subsequent printing system does in fact make some assumptions about R=G=B colors really being the equivalent of DeviceCMYK (0,0,0,K). This is often done at the RIP to resolve the problem of printing office documents, many of which produce only RGB colors where R=G=B is grayscale and the endpoints of (0,0,0) and (255,255,255) are the equivalent of DeviceCMYK (0,0,0,1) and (0,0,0,0) respectively.
Thus, my recommendation is that for any real control of black output using graphic arts software, do not rely on conversions from RGB to either give you pure black / grayscale or for that matter any rich black. It is too much of a crapshoot depending upon the rest of your workflow.
- Dov

X1 info/dashboard/home/some kind of screen?

Over the weekend a 3 year old neice of my wife's got a hold of our Xfinity DVR remote. After she left, I turned the TV on and there was some kind of an info screen on display, that I can not for the life of me identify or reproduce. The screen looked similar to a Windows 8 'tiled' display. Background/wallpaper was a bright flowery image, not the typical black Xfinity menu/guide type screen, with a scrolling information box in the lower left corner of the screen. The box contained weather information, and I think traffic information. Audio was from the TV channel that was tuned in, which I believe to be completely unrelated to the information/dashboard/home/whatever screen. Once I got back to regular TV mode, I have been unable to figure out what had been turned on. I've looked at the available apps, hit just about every combination of buttons on the remote... and have been unable to reproduce whatever mode our young relative did, completely by accident. The remote for the TV itself wasn't accessible... so whatever got turned on was done via the Xfinity/Comcast remote. Does anybody have any idea what got turned on, activated, whatever?

Phredrick wrote:
Over the weekend a 3 year old neice of my wife's got a hold of our Xfinity DVR remote. After she left, I turned the TV on and there was some kind of an info screen on display, that I can not for the life of me identify or reproduce. The screen looked similar to a Windows 8 'tiled' display. Background/wallpaper was a bright flowery image, not the typical black Xfinity menu/guide type screen, with a scrolling information box in the lower left corner of the screen. The box contained weather information, and I think traffic information. Audio was from the TV channel that was tuned in, which I believe to be completely unrelated to the information/dashboard/home/whatever screen. Once I got back to regular TV mode, I have been unable to figure out what had been turned on. I've looked at the available apps, hit just about every combination of buttons on the remote... and have been unable to reproduce whatever mode our young relative did, completely by accident. The remote for the TV itself wasn't accessible... so whatever got turned on was done via the Xfinity/Comcast remote. Does anybody have any idea what got turned on, activated, whatever? Use the childproof remote featurehttp://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/cable-tv/x1-comcast-labs/(scroll down the page)

Art Brushes appear grey, and not Rich Black.

Art brushes are showing a grey version of what should be a Rich Black RGB 0, 0, 0,. Furthermore, expanding the art brush stroke and sampling the color shows the strokes "Black" is actually: 32,32,32, pre-expansion the RGB sample shows the stroke is 0,0,0.
Color Mode=RGB
Print Proof=NO
Document =RGB
Display all Blacks, print all Blacks=Rich Black
Options for Art Brush show art brush swatch is Rich Black but using eyedropper (within brush options window) and sampling preview stroke CHANGES swatch preview from Rich Black to Grey. (see attachments)
image 1 (below): Art brush stroke (greyish), over top of pen tool shape (rich Black)
image 2 (below): RGB of stroke
image 3 (below): RGB of stroke after converting to shape.
Image 4 (below—art brush options): Art Brush Before sampling using colorization...
Image 5 (below—art brush options): Art Brush sampled using colorization..

Try this.
Use one of the Chalk and Charcoal brushes, like Charcoal - Feather.
Set the colorization method to NONE.
Make a mark. Take a sample reading with the Eyedropper tool. The RGB value will be, 32,32,32 (or some place around there) but defiantly not 0,0,0.
Now EXPAND the stroke and take a reading of the shapes color. Same values.
It is NOT RICH BLACK.
I DO NOT understand emils directions.

Rich Black – Some kind of guideline / template?

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