Printing Book in Black and White - What profile should I use.

[buckclemley]

Hi Guys,

Forgive my lack of understanding here, this is all new to me.

I've just finished writing my book on guitar lessons for total beginners in Affinity Publisher. I've had a run of 160 copies printed. The pages like most music books are black ink on a white page. As there are many photos in the book I converted them all to black and white.

I'm lucky my friend runs the printing business that printed my book. The first copy he ran off as a proof all the images printed very faded, same thing happens on my mono laser printer at home too. He said the print file I sent him had 8 colours of black in it. So he had to go through each page and change it to one, which is what the professional digital printers use.

I want to upload to Amazon KPD for sale there where they print copies to order. I assume they use the same digital printers.

I've tried using all these different combinations

Colour Format Gray 8 - Colour Profile Grayscale D50

Colour Format Gray 8 - Colour Profile Generic Gray Profile

Colour Format Gray 8 - Colour Profile Generic Gray Gamma Profile 2.2

Same issue with all of them, I understand I can install different Colour Profiles???? My friend changed everything in Pre Flight, I think it was adobe Illustrator.

ATTACHED: 2 examples of what I exported and a photo of what the printed version looks like using above settings. Also photo of the same page from my book which my firend changed to one colour black (in adobe Illustrator I think)

 

So in short, what colour format/profile do I need to use to send my book to a professional printer (Amazon) that they can print it in black and white????

Sorry for my lack of understanding, ask me anything you want about guitar playing or music theory, but at a total loss here

Thanks in advance guys

Clem

Gamma Guitar for the Outright Beginner RASTAD A4 B&W.pdf test 1 Guitar for the Outright Beginner RASTAD A4 B&W.pdf

Edited December 15, 2020 by buckclemley

[Dazmondo77]

The way would do it would be to make sure you're document is set to CMYK and choose whatever profile your printer mate recommends - say ISO coated 300% - this should work by resetting the colour on  your existing document but I'd advise working on a copy - then go to adjustments and add a B&W adjustment layer to the top of your layer stack and tweak to your liking - then you can always test to see that only black is showing in Photo persona in the info panel and rolling the curser over your darkest black which should only read a percentage in the K (black) channel - (if your document is setup in RGB you would get a four channel reading) when happy either cut and paste the B&W adjustment onto a master page and assign to your pages moving to the top layer or copy and paste the B&W adjustment to the top of the layer stack of each page - then if you output your PDF/x file leave the colour settings as : as document and use document profile - generate - and if you open your pdf in acrobat pro and look at output preview you should be able to switch off your black separation and see no other colour ----- hopefully this helps?

[Fixx]

14 minutes ago, BofG said:

The general consensus was that KDP is not colour managed at all, so the easiest and most consistent approach would be to use an sRGB document and have the images in that same colour space, then export to the pdf version that KDP asks for.

You mean KDP is always CMYK process regardless if the content is just greyscale, or as in this case, greyscale images printed as four colour plates?

[buckclemley]

Thanks guys,

@Dazmondo77 That worked a treat, Thank you so much for taking the time to record a video for me. I can't describe how thankful I am. You're my hero for the year 2020!!!!!!

@BofG Thanks for that link, some very helpful information in there for me. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

@Fixx Thanks for taking the time to reply to.

 

 

Guys thanks so so much.

[Dazmondo77]

1 minute ago, buckclemley said:

@Dazmondo77 That worked a treat, Thank you so much for taking the time to record a video for me. I can't describe how thankful I am. You're my hero for the year 2020!!!!!!

No problem buckclemley - Merry Christmas 🎄🎅👍

[lacerto]

(...)

[ScottFromWyoming]

On 12/16/2020 at 7:41 AM, Lagarto said:

As you had your document and images in grayscale, the following settings would also produce problem-free grayscale output from your file:

The most important settings here is the color space, which should be "Gray" whenever your document color space is gray-based (e.g. Gray 8), as CMYK based exports either might convert the gray values to four-color grays, or if color profile is embedded, would produce an ICC-based export which can be incorrectly rendered in CMYK at print time even if color values are actually grayscale (as in both of the PDF files you provided they were).

Amazon print process also recommends PDF 1.4 as that guarantees that there are no transparencies. Their printing process is basically non-calamanaged so it isi imporat that all color values are in same color space and that the document does not have ICC profiles. One way to produce this is using CMYK doucment profile, make sure that all color values are K-only (do not have CMYK values), and then producing e.g. with PDF/X-a1:2003), and the other is to have just grayscale source color values and export and make sure that target color space stays gray, so that the PDF becomes "DeviceGray".

Attached is your Generic Gray version read into Publisher and exported with settings above, which produces a DeviceGray PDF (contarty to your original file which was ICC-based Gray).

  test 1 Guitar for the Outright Beginner RASTAD A4 B&W_devicegray.pdf 1.15 MB · 1 download

I just did about 30 test PDFs to get a handle on what's going on and here's what I see:

In a file with only black ink, built in InDesign, exported with a CMYK profile embedded from InDesign, Acrobat Output Preview (with a CMYK Simulation Profile) shows ink on only the Black plate. The same file exported from Publisher shows ink on all 4 plates. If I switch Acrobat to a grayscale simulation profile, it shows as 100K and that's it. If I option-click to edit a black object from the "bad" PDF using Illustrator, it opens up correctly as 0,0,0,100K. 

A second file built natively in Publisher, set up as a grayscale file, also fails in the same way: Previewed in Acrobat with a CMYK simulation, it has ink on all 4 plates.

Unembedding the profile fixes the problem... which isn't really a problem so long as the file outputs correctly, but it makes preflighting nearly impossible. My black-only PDF will be placed onto a page with CMYK objects and that will be exported to CMYK; my black PDF must not separate!  So maybe the profile-embedding is converting the preview to RGB while leaving the actual underlying vector data alone? 

I'll keep testing.

 

[buckclemley]

5 hours ago, ScottFromWyoming said:

I just did about 30 test PDFs to get a handle on what's going on and here's what I see:

In a file with only black ink, built in InDesign, exported with a CMYK profile embedded from InDesign, Acrobat Output Preview (with a CMYK Simulation Profile) shows ink on only the Black plate. The same file exported from Publisher shows ink on all 4 plates. If I switch Acrobat to a grayscale simulation profile, it shows as 100K and that's it. If I option-click to edit a black object from the "bad" PDF using Illustrator, it opens up correctly as 0,0,0,100K. 

A second file built natively in Publisher, set up as a grayscale file, also fails in the same way: Previewed in Acrobat with a CMYK simulation, it has ink on all 4 plates.

Unembedding the profile fixes the problem... which isn't really a problem so long as the file outputs correctly, but it makes preflighting nearly impossible. My black-only PDF will be placed onto a page with CMYK objects and that will be exported to CMYK; my black PDF must not separate!  So maybe the profile-embedding is converting the preview to RGB while leaving the actual underlying vector data alone? 

I'll keep testing.

 

Thanks @ScottFromWyoming

I have the problem sorted, I posted this back in December. Thankfully got the problem sorted pretty quickly.
The book is for sale on Amzon, I've had a proof sent to me and everthing is perfect.

Here's a link if you're intrested

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08QWBZBJN