Text Black question and exporting pdf for artwork

[Andrew Heath]

Dear All. I am creating artwork in Publisher which combines text and CMYK images and will be used to produce litho print from. I have (believe I have) created a 'text black' swatch. This is purely 100% K. No other colours. No Cyan, Magenta or Yellow. However, when I export as a pdf and review in Photo. The 'text black' has reverted to a CMYK black.

Please help.

Andrew

PS. Is there a way to see seperations in Publisher?

[Andrew Heath]

After further tests... it seems as though Publisher is NOT applying the swatch that I created.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

[loukash]

See

 

[Andrew Heath]

Hi Loukash... thank you for that. I will have a look at this. Do you know if there is a way for seeing separations in Publisher as I could do in InDesign?

[wonderings]

Seems to be lots of issues with black and being true 100% K. This seems to always come down to the colour profile you are using. I have zero issues when just using a standard US Web Coated Swop 2. This was on by default and gives me files that matches how I set up the file in Publisher. No issues with K turning into CMYK. I would suggest trying to switch your colour profile in the document settings to US Web Coated Swop 2 and see if that works for you. 

[Andrew Heath]

Hi Wonderings... I've managed to get it working by manually adjusting the CMYK sliders for each bit of text or for example black picture keylines. This exports fine using one of the PDF/X profiles (I haven't tried it yet with other profiles. I'm now wondering if I've actually created the swatch correctly in the first place and will redo and replace my 'Text Black' swatch. So that's next on to do list. I've had this problem always with Publisher and find the way it handles colour and swatches very confusing! I'm used to Indesign (and was glad when Publisher came along) but think there is room to redo this part of the programme!

 

Will repost back.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, Andrew Heath said:

Do you know if there is a way for seeing separations in Publisher as I could do in InDesign?

Nothing that I'm aware of.
I'm still relying on Acrobat 10 for preflight control etc., as long as it works on my MacOS partitions (need to check if it works on Catalina).
Eventually I'll likely migrate to PDF Checkpoint.

1 hour ago, wonderings said:

Seems to be lots of issues with black and being true 100% K. This seems to always come down to the colour profile you are using.

Finding the correct setting is somewhat counterintuitive, but at the end of the day – as noted in the aforelinked thread – this should work:

• Color Space: As document (= CMYK)
• Profile: Use document profile (!)
• Embed profile: off (unless you want PDF/X)
• Honor spot colors: on

2 hours ago, wonderings said:

I would suggest trying to switch your colour profile in the document settings to US Web Coated Swop 2 and see if that works for you. 

It doesn't matter which profile you're using. You just don't want to convert from one to another after exporting.

1 hour ago, Andrew Heath said:

This exports fine using one of the PDF/X profiles

Because that's how PDF/X is supposed to work.

5 hours ago, Andrew Heath said:

I export as a pdf and review in Photo. The 'text black' has reverted to a CMYK black.

Haven't noticed this ^ before: why would you want to "review in Photo"?

~~~

That all said, I just noticed that there's a bug when copying a K100 text/path from another Publisher document that has a different CMYK profile: it converts to composite black. Possibly it's because Document Setup > Color > Color Profile cannot be changed from "Convert" to "Assign" for some reason unknown to me.

Could be that you're using a different CMYK profile in Photo than in Publisher?

[loukash]

29 minutes ago, loukash said:

Possibly it's because Document Setup > Color > Color Profile cannot be changed from "Convert" to "Assign" for some reason unknown to me.

Alright, apparently those "Assign"/"Convert" buttons are only meant to be used when changing the document profile, according to this thread.

31 minutes ago, loukash said:

there's a bug when copying a K100 text/path from another Publisher document that has a different CMYK profile: it converts to composite black

As of now I suspect that Serif may even consider this to be a "feature". Oh well.
The workaround is the same as with opening an exported Publisher PDF in Photo:
Before copying between documents, make sure both have the same CMYK profile assigned.

Oh well…

[lacerto]

(...)

[loukash]

5 hours ago, Lagarto said:

switch to Photo Persona and use Channels to see how colors are distributed in CMYK channels (this is not equivalent to proper separations preview as it would not show e.g. spot colors and overprints

Thanks, this is a least a partial workaround. However, the lack of overprint preview is a "dealbreaker" anyway…

[Andrew Heath]

Hey thanks everyone!... I didn't expect this much response so huge thanks for your time.

I only do these jobs a few times a year... mainly to produce CD print artwork for myself. So I always forget how to get around these problems and very obviously don't know the programme half as much as you people. I will explore the photo persona - I think that will help as I don't use spot colours - and I've made a note of the pdf export settings so further tests are in order today. I'm on Big Sur and one strange thing I noted woking on a test document is that when I use the 'pipette' tool to pick a colour from screen of a black square (manually set to only 100% K), on the swatches pallette it doesn't work and only gives the CMYK readings. Maybe a bug?

Further tests today.

[lacerto]

(...)