Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

How can I print or generate a pdf with 100% black


Recommended Posts

4 hours ago, Lagarto said:

"I should not expect Affinity apps to be able to output CMYK data to printer". I have not expected ever since.

I printed a proof from Pub this morning that looks pre-rasterised before hitting my PS printer, but CMYK is definitely correct, I always check the colour bars with a linen tester, CMYK all solid single pass - the background black of the artwork is also correct which is setup as my own preference for 160% density rich black = 20C 20M 20Y 100K - 

-"I should not expect Affinity apps to be able to output CMYK data to printer":-    This ability is a basic requirement for pro design apps, and even though theres a workaround for CMYK, Affinity apps print dialog need some work if it wants to compete with adobe, so I hope there'll be an improvement sometime in the future 

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 16.09.00.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 16.11.34.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 16.07.43.png

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Dazmondo77 said:

I printed a proof from Pub this morning that looks pre-rasterised before hitting my PS printer, but CMYK is definitely correct, I always check the colour bars with a linen tester, CMYK all solid single pass - the background black of the artwork is also correct which is setup as my own preference for 160% density rich black = 20C 20M 20Y 100K - 

-"I should not expect Affinity apps to be able to output CMYK data to printer":-    This ability is a basic requirement for pro design apps, and even though theres a workaround for CMYK, Affinity apps print dialog need some work if it wants to compete with adobe, so I hope there'll be an improvement sometime in the future 

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 16.09.00.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 16.11.34.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 16.07.43.png

Personally I do not find it all that important to be able to print in CMYK, but extremely important to export files that are CMYK and correct. Still should be something that should work, but I wonder if you will see less and less people in pro environments actually "printing" to the output device. Thankfully I stopped fighting with print drivers and things like that years ago when our RIPs all moved to PDF work flows. Export the PDF, drop it in, away we go. The basic tests I have done have not given me any problems with Publisher and it coming out something other then the CMYK makeup I had set in Publisher. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dazmondo77 I too don't understand how you are getting cmyk through. Unless maybe your printer driver is really good at mapping rgb data back to those colours. Can you print separations on your printer? That would show for sure what is going through.

I tried quite a while ago with a CMYK document > cmyk print profile > PostScript printer (set to no colour management) and 100k in the source came out as a mix on all four separations. This was from Designer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Unless there is some recent development (which I doubt), it does not seem that CMYK print output is really possible with Affinity apps.

Maybe I should have included a pic of a printout showing the differences between using Affinitys Auto and the documents colour profile when printing so you can see the CMYK difference  - on my Xerox Phaser 6180DN, sending artwork to print and using auto profile (which looks as though its converted to RGB then back to CMYK) would give solid cyan around 90C 10M 8Y 0K  and similar for solid MYK but using the affinity artworks same document colour profile gives solid cyan 100C 0M 0Y 0K  which looks the same as sending from acrobat, although vectors and fonts are far better output from Acrobat - the Xerox Phaser 6180 is only 600dpi so you can see straight away if colours are printing wrong - I used to output old school proofs from film separations to 3M matchprints and cromalins 20 odd years ago so I've seen many many colour bars - one of the first Matchprint proofs I did was for Serif PagePlus must have been 1995, our whole company was mac based so someone from Serif used to have a walk over to us and drop off a Floppy disc containing a .PRN file (still never come across any other company using .PRN) we'd run it to film from an Hyphen image setter and perfect film seps for PagePlus, no bother supporting CMYK back then 

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, BofG said:

I tried quite a while ago with a CMYK document > cmyk print profile > PostScript printer (set to no colour management) and 100k in the source came out as a mix on all four separations. This was from Designer.

I tried loads of times and got similar results - I'm guessing it was prob December last year when I decided to re-calibrate my monitor, and dug out all my old press colour match stuff as I like to work end to end CMYK, and just thought I'd have another go with Affinity and found that the CMYK colour results to be the same as Acrobat by selecting the documents colour profile (Coated FOGRA27) which are solid CMYK colour bars that are a half decent match to my old press proofs 

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 20.45.04.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 20.45.19.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 20.45.29.png

Screenshot 2020-06-23 at 20.45.37.png

IMG_2947.JPG

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dazmondo77 That's interesting, perhaps it's something to do with ColorSync?

I'm on Windows, I might have another try with some separations to double check if it's still like before.

It would be nice if someone from Serif could just pop by and give us the technical breakdown of what/if/how we can get reliable colour managed print data to our cmyk printers. From what @Lagarto linked to the dev said it's not possible, but then you seem to be managing it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Lagarto said:

results_cmsbyapp_apub.jpg.ae4fea0216b24593d01a4c8208eaab09.jpg

 

Interestingly, I do get a similar printed result printing from Affinity pub, but only on graduated tint fills of 100% down to 0% where theres clearly a dot of yellow and magenta in the cyans and similar MYK yet still on solids and tints it remains pure - ????? anyhow - there is clearly a need for a straightforward path to CMYK print to capable printers - we should not be even having this debate as it's just a basic standard need for a pro print publishing app to be able to print accurate output - it's the only app I can think of that I've ever prepared artwork which is designed for CMYK output that can't easily print to CMYK printers??????? 

Below: crappy photo illustrating the differences between the same CMYK FOGRA27 test sheet sent from Acrobat and Publisher : only the set of colour bars which is set up as solid to white graduated tints reproduces as if converted to RGB then back to CMYK the rest, although Postscript sharp vectors is very hit and miss (very miss on this particular page), the other CMYK elements are pure???

Maybe it could be my printer sees an RGB tag to CMYK data and can just and just waft it away for the majority of data, I don't know?

I have also managed used Gutenprint in the past, which is a set of alternative print drivers for many consumer inkjets which enables extra features including direct CMYK printing - it works!  

Screenshot 2020-06-24 at 10.48.47.png

Screenshot 2020-06-24 at 11.14.06.png

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

only on graduated tint fills of 100% down to 0% where theres clearly a dot of yellow and magenta in the cyans and similar MYK yet still on solids and tints it remains pure - ?????

I think my earlier guess about it being your printer driver doing a good job of mapping to primaries might be correct. On my Oki I can force "K only" black and it works with quite a surprising range of CMYK "black" mixes.

When I started trying to set up a colour managed workflow, the Affinity apps didn't display anything other than RGB profiles for print output. I queried this and it got logged as a bug, and then a while later the CMYK profiles were listed there. It seems like it wasn't a bug at all - there should not be any CMYK profiles in the print options. They don't work at all properly - the app seems to convert document colour space > profile defined space > some who-knows-what RGB space > hands off to the printer driver.

I have a range of materials that I need to colour match in print. I used a spectrophotometer (sic?) to scan the colours, and then calibrated my printer with that same device (an X-Rite). Using Windows colour management I get a perfect match. Using Affinity to manage the colours never resulted in a match, no matter what I tried. It was never going to - the CMYK profile can never be the last step in the conversion like it is meant to be.

I'm sure a lot of users won't notice a thing, the 'default' colour handling of the app and most printers is good enough, but when accuracy is important the print colour management in the Affinity apps just isn't up to scratch.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, BofG said:

there should not be any CMYK profiles in the print options

Damn I hope they don't change it back, I just did a black test and ran a page setup in grayscale just using auto settings for colour profile and got a four pass black then ran again and chose Fogra27 colour profile (same as doc) and got pure black with tints - pretty sure if they revert back to RGB only colour profiles for print I'll be looking to move on - any suggestions?

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

Damn I hope they don't change it back, I just did a black test and ran a page setup in grayscale just using auto settings for colour profile and got a four pass black then ran again and chose Fogra27 colour profile (same as doc) and got pure black with tints - pretty sure if they revert back to RGB only colour profiles for print I'll be looking to move on - any suggestions?

Then the mystery deepens. At this point I've no idea what they are doing, it does seem to be different on MacOS vs Windows. I know before nothing I did got cmyk into the print driver, the stack of test prints I have is pretty tall so I'm sure I tried everything. I'll have another go later though and report back.

I wouldn't worry about them changing it back, I doubt it's on their radar and even if it is I believe the "to do" list is pretty full with more important things.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dazmondo77, @Lagarto

I'm getting odd results here...

Here's what I did:

1) New document > Press Ready > Default colour space (CMYK/8 - U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2)

2) Printer driver: Turned all colour management OFF. Set printer to produce separations (i.e. one sheet per colour (CMYK), each shows the output specific to that colour).

3) Added the text "CMYK" to the document, each letter as "artistic text" each set to 100% of their respective colour.

4) In the print dialouge > colour management chose "Colour Handling: Performed by App", with the profile the same as the document.

RESULT - Correct separations - one letter only on each sheet out, each at 100% coverage.

Next I changed the colours in the document for each letter to:

"C" - 50% Cyan, 50% Magenta
"M" - as above
"Y" 50% Magenta, 50% Yellow

This should give the following pages out as separations:

1- Cyan Channel - The letters "CM" @ 50%
2- Magenta Channel - The letters "CMY" @ 50%
3- Yellow Channel - The letter "Y" @ 50%

The results were nearly correct:

1: "CM", looks right at 50%
2: "CMY", they are at about 40% which is wrong.
3: "Y", at about 30% which is wrong.

So in conclusion: I give up :)

cmyk-out.jpg.d82e532910bf70203bb8ff883b0c4b39.jpg

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, BofG said:

I wouldn't worry about them changing it back, I doubt it's on their radar and even if it is I believe the "to do" list is pretty full with more important things.

Well it's still not great as it stands as it seems to pre rasterise before RIP,  I know my Xerox Phaser 6180DN has a lot of Pantone colour simulation tech built in so maybe it does some kind of on the fly conversion in RIP ??? - I can only trust Acrobat (or InDesign or Quark) for a pretty accurate quality printout, that is just really bad 

 

50 minutes ago, BofG said:

So in conclusion: I give up :)

And me, although I'm pretty angry to the point i'm looking for other options --- without subscription --- 😡

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

And me, although I'm pretty angry to the point i'm looking for other options --- without subscription --- 😡

Acrobat reader (the free one) might be worth a look. It actually has more colour control options than Affinity, and prints nicer too. I'm assuming on MacOS you can run it through ColorSync to use ICC profiles, it works happily with Windows Colour Management. You do then have to make a pdf for everything you want to print, which I quickly got fed up with doing.

I did look into dedicated RIP options, but they started at £850.

It's a shame that Affinity print colour management doesn't work properly, I think the bigger shame is that it acts as though it does. I wasted a lot of paper and time trying to get it working whilst thinking I must have been doing something wrong. I have a whole ream of 350gsm colour calibration charts!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...
On 6/24/2020 at 5:07 PM, BofG said:

It's a shame that Affinity print colour management doesn't work properly, I think the bigger shame is that it acts as though it does.

Exactly... For all of of us who do design for print this is so annoying. Each time when I'm finished with designing and I want to get proper PDFs for offset printing to my printers shop it gives me such a headache as from the Affinity apps' (especially Publisher) settings (document setup & export settings) I strongly feel like I've really set it all correctly but somewhere there must be some glitches in the underlying logic of the apps because more often than not I find the PDFs not to be what should have been expected considering the settings having been made (primarily "black" not turning out as just 100% K).

With InDesign you just set up your general colour management once for your apps, choose the colour profile you need/want on export and everything will be fine in 99+% of the cases. You just don't have to worry about it – it's highly reliable. With my Affinity produced PDFs, however, I'm unfortunately dreading each time what Acrobat Pro will actually unveil... It doesn't feel good and doesn't match the good feeling I – admittedly – generally have when I'm still in the process of designing with Publisher (even though there are some things I wish were handled more ergonomically by or added to the app).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Jiorgos I'm actually trying not to rule out Publisher as a tool for productive use as I'm thoroughly fed up with Adobe's general policies. I do want the Affinity apps to stay on the the scene and successfully compete with the near-monopolist. That being said I think that what's happening here in the forum is important to make the Affinity team work even harder to finally and fully make the apps live up to their promises. I really hope these issues we're talking about will be resolved sooner or (rather not so much) later...

I have to admit, though, that so far I tend to use Publisher productively only on small projects (the odd flyer or leaflet – completely new or maybe even migrated/converted from InDesign) where there's a good chance any glitches won't slip through unnoticed (and if they do nevertheless the actual damage will be quite limited).
Right now, however, I'd in fact be very reluctant to use Publisher on any job where hundreds or thousands of euros/dollars in printing costs will be involved. But – exactly this will have to change: professional users must eventually be able to be confident straightaway that their designs for any project will be output in a correct state of the art way for commercial printing without having to worry what could have gone wrong again this time (colours, rasterization effects etc.).
A truly ergonomic user experience and bulletproof reliability regarding its final output for me is what will really make a publishing app meant for professional and productive use actually "professional" in the end.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Jiorgos said:

Yes, unfortunately, my fear formulated at the beginning has been confirmed. The problem is really annoying, and as long as it is not really fixed, Publisher is unfortunately out of the question for me for productive use.

Printing directly there's  no solution, but exporting first to a pdf and maintaining your specified CMYK values can be done.

You have to set up the document in the profile you want to finally export to, and then use one of the 'PDF-X' types to export to, ensuring the export profile is set to match the document.

The whole thing is annoyingly opaque, there are lots of ways it could be improved.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Since I am also thoroughly fed up with Adobe's licensing policy, I have been looking for an alterantive for quite some time. Scribus was interesting to me as an open source project, but unfortunately it does not yet meet my requirements – I primarily design complex books – especially in terms of ergonomics. I was all the more pleased when I discovered Serif PagePlus X9 and found out that the program had been further developed with Publisher. But with the deficit described here, I can't use the program for my jobs with a quiet conscience, because the risk is too great for me. I need reliability for the creation of print data. Therefore I hope that the problem will be solved as soon as possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...
On 6/23/2020 at 12:39 PM, wonderings said:

Really have no idea how you are not getting 100% K in a PDF file. I set up this file in 2 mins and exported to PDF. K is 100%. No CMYK makeup.

Again as I posted before I made a new document with CMYK colour mode. Typed my text, made my black box. Set to 100% K in the slider. Export to PDF with "PDF for print" default option. I did not change anything in the more section. PDF is 100% K. Am I missing something here?

100 K.pdf 383.11 kB · 1 download 100 K.zip 31.79 kB · 3 downloads

I just downloaded your file, exported with no changes, print ready export, and when i took it into acrobat it wasn't 100k black. im having the same issues as everyone else and its driving me crazy, if i take the same file EPS it and Pdf via AI, it comes out perfect 100K black, deffo an affinity its problem but whyat i would love to know, apparently you're either bless by the print gods and able to 100k or you are not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, feelingprettyred said:

I just downloaded your file, exported with no changes, print ready export, and when i took it into acrobat it wasn't 100k black. im having the same issues as everyone else and its driving me crazy, if i take the same file EPS it and Pdf via AI, it comes out perfect 100K black, deffo an affinity its problem but whyat i would love to know, apparently you're either bless by the print gods and able to 100k or you are not.

Does the PDF I uploaded not show 100% K as well or only the publisher file? If my PDF is fine for you then I still think there is a setting somewhere before exporting. 

I completely agree this is an Affinity problem, lots of people having this issue and this should not be complicated. I never even think about this and never have issues with any RIP I use, any outsourcing printer I use or internally for digital or offset. 

I just went through this again, downloaded my original publisher file from the post above. Opened it, exported as PDF and opened in Acrobat DC. Black is 100% K

Screen Shot 2021-03-09 at 10.29.45 AM.png

Screen Shot 2021-03-09 at 10.29.58 AM.png

Screen Shot 2021-03-09 at 10.30.12 AM.png

Screen Shot 2021-03-09 at 10.33.16 AM.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, feelingprettyred said:

I just downloaded your file, exported with no changes, print ready export, and when i took it into acrobat it wasn't 100k black.

Just in case: Because Affinity doesn't export with its presets "(for print)" and "(press ready)" a rendering intent you might get presented by Acrobat a differing result when watching the PDF with your default Acrobat profile AND if this is different to the profile embedded in the PDF. In that case choose the display profile in Acrobat according to the PDF profile to get for the same PDF content CMY values = 0.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, rizzosan67 said:

I don't know if the information can be useful but if you don't select the "embed profiles" check box, the pdf export keeps the black at 100%

If I remember correctly (it's been some time ago) the printing service which has been doing a lot of my print jobs once stated that they actually and specifically don't want to have any colour profiles embedded in the PDFs they receive for printing... They will just take for granted that you create the PDFs according to their specs (including the use of – say – ISOcoatedv2_300% profile for PDF export) and then print accordingly. Which especially means there will be no CMYK to CMYK conversion taking place within their workflow. The PDF just stays "as is“. So leaving the profile embedding option unticked while exporting may in fact be a good idea (though it may depend on the print service's actual workflow eventually).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.