PDF-Export problem: Black Text is not 100 % K in PDF

[H. P. Salzer]

Hello!

I am making a brochure with 36 pages. I have text in 100 % K, all pictures are set as TIF in CMYK and I use a printing profile "Euroscale coated V2". In my Publisher document the colour of the text is 100 % K - but unfortunately not in the PDF. The "Help-Section" does not help me to avoid this change of the Text colour. What do I wrong ... or what shall I do?

I have an iMac 27', Retina 5K, 2019 with 16 GB RAM, macOS Mojave 10.14.6 an Affinity Publisher 1.7.3

Unfortunately this topic is very urgent.

Hope anybody can help me. Thank you.

H. P.

Edited October 29, 2019 by H. P. Salzer

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[H. P. Salzer]

Many thanks for your answer, Lagarto.

My problem is: I am German and my English is not good enough to understand all the specialized terminology in English ...

My printing shop told me to work with "Euroscale coated v2", and so I prepared all my pictures in CMYK and transfered them in Affinty Photo to this profile. But if I understand you right, Affinty is embeding bad/wrong profiles ... ???

I checked all Text and all lines and set them to CMYK 100 % K. So the settings should be okay so far.

But I don't understand the preferences/settings of Publisher, especially in the colour-management. There is an option to link the profiles or to replace ... replacing the profile of the pics (maybe that meens "embeding") is everytime active, when I open the document / maybe Layout preferences/settings in the same document again ... it seems, Publisher does not remember my settings ... or do some changing somethings ... feels little strange.

So: I don't have Adobe Acrobat Pro. So I can not check, what Affinity Publisher really is doing with colours ... and I also don't have InDesign on my new iMac - that all seems to be a bit too expensive for me, when I do such a job once a year. For my PDF-Export I selected the setting "PDF (for print)". You recommend "PDF/X-1a:2003", so I will check this out.

When I understand you in the right way, I shall not use a colour profile for printing when I export my brochure as a PDF. For the colour space I can select "as in document", the same for colour profile. I did so but no change of the result.

When I select printing marks, then suddenly the general preset "PDF/X-1a:2003" disappears in the dialog window - but I can choose the preset for compatibility.

Do you have any experiences with the preset "PDF/X4"? And what means the point "Screen" and I can select "nothing", "all" or "not supported features/attributes" (I try to translate the german terms.

Thanks for your Ideas!

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[H. P. Salzer]

Update:

It is not possible to export a PDF in any "PDF/X..." format. See attached screenshot of the error message. So I cannot give you a page to compare with my default Print setting.

But I can give you a page of my actual PDF, exported with "PDF (for Print)", also attached as "Festschrift_50_ ..." .

And I add a screenshot of my PDF-Export panel.

And: Sorry for my bad English and some missunderstandings ...

Thanks, H. P.

 

Festschrift_50_print-5_page-5.pdf

[Joachim_L]

Hmm, I would say everything fine with your black text. See attached image. See the marked places to look at.

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[H. P. Salzer]

Thanks for your answers, Joachim and Lagarto!

The problem appeared in case my Laserprinter rasterized K:100% ... the last time I did such a job (brochure) have been around 10 years ago ... there with InDesign and before with QuarkXPress ... now I have a new iMac, new System and very old licenses ... so I decided check Affinity Publisher ... I do such jobs maybe once or twice a year ... so I don't have a seamless calibration of scanner, iMac and Printer. As the printer rasterized K:100%, I told this my Print Shop ... and they got this habit too. I realized that I was not familiar with the colour field panel. Now I have created a colour palette/sample board for the dokument with fix global colours and checked every text in the whole document. Also I checked all pictures and set two accidently left RGBs to CMYK - also "Greyscale-pics", because "greyscale" was exported with 4 colours. In case of time pressure such things happened to me ... in my normal life I have serious daytime job. After I have all this checked and selected the export settings in this way, this is the result in the PDF document. Anyway: the printer is going on to rasterize K:100% ... but if it works for the Print Shop this time, it's okay for me.

The Problem with the PDF Export in a "PDF/X-..." format I checked the point you asked me, Lagarto. No other Applications are open. Maybe the brochure is too big with 36 pages and around 97 MB for this PDF setting ... with the other setting "PDF (ready for print)" it works. So I think, I will start a new topic/question.

For this point: Many thanks for your help and your answers!

[H. P. Salzer]

One more question - sorry!

When I don't use Adobe Acrobat Pro - is there another Application for Mac to check my PDF - printing settings, marks, colours and so on - before I send it to the Print Shop?

Just for this and maybe without a monthly payment license ... or is in this case no alternative App on the market?

If you have a recommendation I would be happy.

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[Joachim_L]

There are online tools (don't know a good one), more expensive tools like Callas PDFToolbox or cheaper tools like PDF Studio. Both of them have trial versions.

[H. P. Salzer]

Okay I understand! That seems to be the standard way ... I learned in the 80-ies "Lithograph - Reproretoucheur" in Germany ... with typo raster on film and chemical fluids for adapting colours and to make some corrections. So I am very familiar to work on CMYK! There I know, what I do ... I have not that look and feel with RGB ... So: I have a sRGB pic in Affinity Foto and work on it, selecting in the adaption/transfoming panel "Gradation Curves" and there the CMYK-Mode ... will this be good, when I leave the pic in sRGB? If yes I will try it next time.

Thank you!

[CarlosK]

Hi,

 I read this topic, but I cannot figure out the solution to my problem anyway.

 

I want to print a book with cmyk photos and black text, but the text appears to be made up of cmyk after export. Can somebody help me? To export this page I used the PDF/X-4 settings.

testblack_.pdf

[CarlosK]

BTW

The text appears to be 100% K in my afpub file. It has been delivered by a friend as pdf, which I placed into my afpub file. ( The reason for this being he is a typographer and uses InDesign)

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[CarlosK]

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work. Although I realized that the document color mode was wrong, setting it to cmyk and exporting as PDF/X-4  still yields the same problem. Inspite text color being 100% K

[CarlosK]

I realized that just exporting text ends up with 100K. But a page with an image on it will have K been split up into CMYK

 

CORRECTION: When I double click the text (an embedded pdf, see above), and export the text from there (filetab is headlined as "embedded"), the text in the pdf has 100K. How can then have the same effect when exporting from the normal document view? I'm sure if the text was not embedded as pdf, the problem would not occur

[H. P. Salzer]

Hello Carlos,

my solution for the topic was this way: In the preferences the colour mode was set to CMYK. For every document I create my own colour palette / colour selection chart. There I define C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=100 with the CMYK fader and create it as a colour field. Then everything works on my system, also when I have colour images in my document. When I define K=100 with the greyscale fader it is always splitted in 4 colours.

This also happend to greyscale pictures, created years ago in Photoshop. I had to open them in Affinity Photo, set them to "black and white" and then to convert them into CMYK to see the result ... with this routine, they came back to black only.

Hope this helps a little.

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, CarlosK said:

But a page with an image on it will have K been split up into CMYK

With an image selected you can use the "K only" button in the context toolbar to reduce it to its K channel in a CMYK pdf export.

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[Lorox]

Coming from Adobe InDesign and actually being highly motivated to finally switch to Affinity for good, I find the way Affinity Publisher handles these things very irrtitating.

From the start it has been the desired effect of efficient colour management that you could design your document in a certain colour space (say: the one appropriate for offset printing on coated paper – using the corresponding colour profile as your file's colour space) but NOT being confined to that colour space chosen in the beginning as you could choose another colour profile later for outputting to PDF, should the necessity arise to have your design printed in another way than originally intended – e.g. on newspaper stock where different printing colours behave totally different on different paper.

This has hardly ever been a problem in InDesign as during output colour spaces have been converted quite reliably from the document's colour space to the colour space of any special printing process for which you'd need a PDF equipped with the corresponding colour profile.

However, with Affinity Publisher, it somehow doesn't work this way:

I have done some testing today in Affinity Publisher 1.8.3 with 2 afpub-files – one setup with general European standard "ISO Coated v2" and one setup with "ISO Coated v2 300%" which is pretty much the same profile but with a reduced ink coverage of 300% (which is preferred by many online print services due to shorter drying time of the prints).

I was especially concerned about black text (100% K) being unadvertedly converted to mixed CMYK values as this is something you really just DON'T want.

Checking the created PDF-files with Acrobat Pro showed that 100% K text had only been preserved in the PDFs if the document colour space was exactly the same colour space that you had chosen in the settings for PDF output (here PDF/1-a:2003). Meaning: document (ISO Coated v2) > PDF (ISO Coated v2) and document (ISO Coated v2 300%) > PDF (ISO Coated v2 300%) both kept black text just in 100 K as intended – no matter if just the »standard« black colour swatch from Publisher was used or a new, specially created 0/0/0/100 global colour in the »Document« palette. So far so good...

However, going "crosswise" by document (ISO Coated v2) > PDF (ISO Coated v2 300%) or document (ISO Coated v2 300%) > PDF (ISO Coated v2) both ways of profiles not matching for document and PDF output got the previously 100 K text converted to that "rich black" of various CMYK values that you get when you convert RGB Black to CMYK. You don't want this EVER.

To me this behaviour seems to completely ignore the intended use of colour profiles for being able to create PDFs with different colour profiles for different printing scenarios from the SAME original document, which most professionals have used succesfully for years with Adobe InDesign. Why does it get so complicated with Affinity now?

 

BTW:
Changing the Colour Profile used by Adobe Acrobat Pro while examining the PDFs between the 2 profiles mentioned resp. used in the files doesn't change anything about the values that are given for the black text elements.

[thomaso]

12 minutes ago, Lorox said:

I have done some testing today in Affinity Publisher 1.8.3 with 2 afpub-files – one setup with general European standard "ISO Coated v2" and one setup with "ISO Coated v2 300%" which is pretty much the same profile but with a reduced ink coverage of 300% (which is preferred by many online print services due to shorter drying time of the prints).

I was especially concerned about black text (100% K) being unadvertedly converted to mixed CMYK values as this is something you really just DON'T want.

This was reported as unexpected annoyance quite a few times. It seems to be related to default presets (e.g. "for print"), in particular to their activated option "Embed profile" with non-active "Convert image colors".

As pointed out by Lagarto here, if you switch these checkbox activation then the exported PDF may appear correctly even if viewed from another profile.
Note: this does not add an "Output Intent" as with PDF/X export.

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[Lorox]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

This was reported as unexpected annoyance quite a few times. It seems to be related to default presets (e.g. "for print"), in particular to their activated option "Embed profile" with non-active "Convert image colors".

As pointed out by Lagarto here, if you switch these checkbox activation then the exported PDF may appear correctly even if viewed from another profile.
Note: this does not add an "Output Intent" as with PDF/X export.

 

Choosing the settings from your screenshot doesn't make  a difference: 100 K black is converted to 70C/60M/58Y/84K when the profile used for PDF output differs from the document' s profile.

 

18 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

I am not sure if you refer here a situation where you intentionally use at export time a CMYK color profile that differs from the document CMYK color profile, as then Affinity Publisher would perform color conversion similarly as it would if you use the command File > Document Setup > Color, and choose a different color profile (without changing the color mode). This is intended behavior, as Publisher does not have an option equivalent to InDesign that allows "keeping numbers" when switching a color profile at export time (nor does it have swatch like [Black] that allows keeping K100 when performing profile conversion via a menu command).

Yes, sure, I did intentionally use another profile for output as the the original document's profile as this is what definitely should be possible using colour management: being able to deliver PDFs with fitting profiles for various printing environments from ONE and the same document (without changing the original colour profile of the document itself). The necessary conversion is – in my opinion – the key feature when you have to deliver to different printers / printing processes and  this conversion process MUST honour essential settings as 100 K for black text and the keeping of values/"Numbers" for non-image (i.e. vector) content (just think of a client's logo having fixed/defined CMYK settings). So this – somewhat oddly named – "keep numbers" feature of InDesign is something that has to be implemented in Affinity Publisher as soon as possible.

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