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Exporting to black only (gray) profile produces cmyk images


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I have tried everything to fix this issue, but my PDF files for book pages have an element that always somehow gets exported as cmyk black/grey.

I have changed the document profile to grey (Greyscale D50), made sure the colour gradient is defined using only grey %, used cmyk with only black ink and numerous other tweaks. I even rasterised the shape and made sure it contained a Greyscale D50 profile for the embedded image. It keeps coming up on the publisher's system as cmyk black.

I am using latest version Publisher (1.10.5) on Mac Big Sur (11.6.8)

 

Any other thoughts about why this might be occuring are welcome!

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Gray mode is treated as RGB, Photoshop does the same thing.
You have to create the document in CMYK mode.

Though I wish Affinity could export the gray mode document as a K only document.
You can request the feature since it's not a bug.
 

 

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On 11/6/2022 at 8:04 PM, ashf said:

Gray mode is treated as RGB, Photoshop does the same thing.
You have to create the document in CMYK mode.

Though I wish Affinity could export the gray mode document as a K only document.
You can request the feature since it's not a bug.
 

 

I've never had Photoshop treat Gray mode as RGB. 

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3 minutes ago, ashf said:

Try converting  a grayscale image to CMYK. What do you get?

I think that you are misunderstanding. We are talking about exporting here. If you export a grayscale Photoshop file as a PDF, you get a black channel only file, used for printing single color printing. If you export a grayscale AP file as a PDF, you get a CMYK file, which cannot be used for single color printing. That's what this entire post is about.

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11 minutes ago, claidheamdanns said:

I think that you are misunderstanding. We are talking about exporting here. If you export a grayscale Photoshop file as a PDF, you get a black channel only file, used for printing single color printing. If you export a grayscale AP file as a PDF, you get a CMYK file, which cannot be used for single color printing. That's what this entire post is about.

Yes, thank you for understanding and clarifying my point. What is the point of having a grayscale profile if it gets converted to rgb or cmyk? If I wanted colour I'd choose a colour profile.

Perhaps the "big announcement" coming tomorrow will fix some of these basic 'duh' items. The other is slug area export for this like fold, die-cut and knife marks... (we wait in hope that Publisher might actually equal InDesign in functionality).

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3 minutes ago, ashf said:

Using by which PDF profile?

I tried LOTS of different PDF export options, but I'm at home right now, so I can really check. I used PDF (press ready), with Color Space set to Gray, and Profile set to Generic Gray Gamma 2.2. I also think I tried pretty much every option that under there that seemed like it might lead to a true black only PDF. None of them worked. As one person said earlier on in this thread "it shouldn't be this hard to accomplish a basic task."

Screen Shot 2022-11-07 at 9.49.06 pm.png

Screen Shot 2022-11-07 at 9.49.43 pm.png

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5 minutes ago, claidheamdanns said:

I tried LOTS of different PDF export options, but I'm at home right now, so I can really check. I used PDF (press ready), with Color Space set to Gray, and Profile set to Generic Gray Gamma 2.2. I also think I tried pretty much every option that under there that seemed like it might lead to a true black only PDF. None of them worked. As one person said earlier on in this thread "it shouldn't be this hard to accomplish a basic task."

Just confirming, "black only" you mean is "K only" CMYK isn't it?  not the 8 bit grayscale?
Then you have to export a CMYK document to a CMYK PDF for the K only PDF.
Neither of Affinity or Photoshop export a PDF that's K only CMYK from a grayscale document, I believe.

Also you should uncheck the "embed profiles" on the export option if it's for printing.

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