Creating press ready pdfs with mixed colour and black plates

[simoncox]

I am going around in circles on this one. I produce a 64 page local magazine that has only 8 pages in colour as that is all that can be afforded (we work on this for free by the way, editorial, production and distribution teams). I can export the colour pages to CMYK pdfs without any issue -that all work perfectly. What I used to do in Quark was export one copy in colour and one in greyscale and then replace the 8 pages with the colour pages in the grey version - send to repro and all was happy. 

On the non colour pages we often have coloured logos and photographs. These are placed in colour as the page order and the pages that are to be colour are decided last in the process due to some dynamics of the way we get information.

In Quark I was able to export to greyscale and it was black plate only grey - including the images. Whilst not perfect this isn't a coffee table art book. We also create a full colour web pdf as well.

I realised that to get the text in true black I had to change that in my style sheets to 100K cmyk - which I have done and that works. However when I change the document profile to greyscale, as suggested in another post, the colour images output to k only - which is perfect then the text is output at grey C72 M68 Y67 K88 and not the C0 M0 Y0 K100 I need for a black plate...

When I export to PDF i think i have tested just about every combination of setting to get K only greyscale images and text but I either get k only greyscale images and CMYK black text or K text and coloured images.

Yes i could go through and change all the images on grey pages to greyscale in Designer and replace those but I did not need to do that in Quark (one tickbox for K only greyscale).

Feature Request. Please can we have the following:

1. a true K only greyscale output to pdf
2. a way to review CMYK separation (Don't mind if that's the ability to export to black separated pdf pages.)

 

 

 

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[simoncox]

Thanks Lagarto.

I tried this and the text still splits to CMYK - the image is ok. The same happens with your graypub.pdf and grayfromcmyk.pdf.

The way I am testing this is to bring the pdf into Affinity Photo - as a CMYK - and then switch the K channel off to see whats left. Perhaps this is the issue but I have no other way of testing! My old Acrobat Pro does not run on OSX Catalina.

 

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[simoncox]

OK. But photo is showing the CMY channels just fine in my tests. I have downloaded a trial of PDF Checkpoint to see if that can show me the separations.

[simoncox]

But thank you Lagarto! I am probably producing OK pdfs - will send a test to my repro house and see what they say.

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[simoncox]

I will let you know how I get on.