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Faded Blacks in Illustrator
Hi there,
I’m pretty new to Illustrator, and I’ve been having some issues with greyed/whited-out parts of my document. In particular, a black image (sillouhete) appears normally black in Illustrator…but once I save it to a PDF, it whites-out a bit, making it noticably not-as-black as the black background. I’ve read elsewhere that this is because of CYMK and RGB differnces (screen vs. pring).
However, no one really established if this is unhealthy or not for a printed PDF with these side-effects. I did print a test of this faded-PDF…and unfortunately, due to the quality of our printers, I can’t really tell.
Is there a way I can fix this before I spend money at Staples printing this out as a final on gloss/whatever paper?
Many thanks,
Hunter—–
Too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?
-Gaff
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3 Replies
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>>In particular, a black image (sillouhete) appears normally black in Illustrator…
Are you placing an image into AI? Is that image CMYK as well?In Preferences > Appearance of Black, make sure you set both on screen and printing dropdown to ‘accurately’. Now if you create a CMYK black in AI and save it as a PDF, you will see the same black in the PDF.
Also, not sure what are you printing but CMYK is for offset printing, which would be more expensive then running it simply through digital printing (which is RGB). If you print at places like Staples, Office Max, etc, I believe they do printing digitally (or can), which is RGB. So you need to ask them whether they print using RGB or CMYK.
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If your document is cmyk, add more inks to the black objects that are showing gray in order to make a rich black. Add cyan, magenta or yellow to it, or a mix of the three.
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Rich black = C 30, M 20, Y, 20, K 100…
If you have black text over color, set it to Overprint or Multiply (but keep it 100% black only)…
Digital Printing is cheaper if you are doing only a limited run… If you are printing more than say, 1000, it is sometimes cheaper to print on a press.
C.R.
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