Better CMYK black printing
Have you ever noticed that areas of pure CMYK 100% black doesn’t seem to be that, well…black when printed on some printed jobs, especially on uncoated stock?
This is particularly noticeable in large printed areas of flat black but there is an easy way to fix this, just throw some more colour into the mix!
There is a lot of debate amongst print artworkers over what gives a perfect black, some preferring a cyan mix, but personally I prefer magenta, I feel it warms up the black making it look richer - so I recommend the CMYK mix of 0/60/0/100. Obviously, if you prefer cyan, just switch the my 60% value from magenta to cyan.
Also, have you ever noticed that Photoshop’s default black is a rich CMYK mix of black of (Apple+D reset colour swatches). I don’t know why Adobe don’t put this in as a preference, I guess they will get round to it eventually! This is a big one to watch - especially when importing images from Photoshop into InDesign or other DTP applications. If your matching up what you think is a black area of an image from Photoshop onto a pure Black (0/0/0/0) rectangle in say InDesign, your gonna have a nasty shock when it goes to print! This can, of course be used very creative subtle effects when used right… But when used wrong it can be disastrous!
When using commercial print, care should be taken if you have ‘reversed out’ white text in these areas, especially if set in very small point sizes. Any misregistration of the printing plates will fill in the text - this goes for any multichannel colour backgrounds.
This rich black should also not be used for small ‘body copy’ type text, the pure black mix of 0/0/0/100 should always be used, especially on white backgrounds. Again, any slight misregistration of the plates will ‘double print’ your text giving it a nasty fuzzy look!
February 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am
Hey Jonny!
Thanks for posting the black “recipe” - you did tell me once but I have been searching for the scrap of paper I wrote it on ever since! Really useful stuff as I am a real of fan of rich black backgrounds.