Blacks

[grahamsmythe]

Am a long-term Quark (v2) user who then jumped ship to Adobe and has now moved over to Affinity. I really do hope that Affinity turns into everything we hope it will. Apologies if this is a basic question to those who have been using this package longer than I have.

I've opened a Publisher file, and have now imported an old Illustrator file as an image. However, the black of the Illustrator files looks almost grey rather than the 100% black that's defined?

What am I missing?

[loukash]

Possibly a color profile mismatch?
Affinity is very unforgiving in that regard, and its color management is rather… well, it needs time to get used to.

Uploading some example files would be useful.

[grahamsmythe]

@loukash Here are a couple of files.

test page.afpub logo.afdesign

[deeds]

After you've sorted input, you might wanna check the forums with a search for:

 

cmyk black

 

to see the sorts of problems that can occur on export, too.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, grahamsmythe said:

Here are a couple of files.

• logo.afdesign is in RGB mode. Even though you have set your curves as K100, you need to convert the document to CMYK, using the same profile as test page.afpub. That's the reason why the logo appears as dark gray in the Publisher.
• The picture frame in the background has a rich black fill, i.e. RGB 0/0/0. That "translates" here to CMYK 72/68/67/88. As the term "rich black" says, that's why it appears "blacker" on screen than plain K100. The color management simply tries to approximate this difference within the display color gamut. It's an always-on soft proof.
  If you want it to print blacK, as the "K" in CMYK, well, then you need to change its color to CMYK 0/0/0/100 as well.

Also, compared e.g. to InDesign (I have ditched QXP4 when ID2 came out, and the onetime QXP 2015 free giveaway just sits on my hard drive, unused ), Affinity doesn't have any "always display K black as rich black" preference setting. Thinking of it now, possibly that's in fact a Good Thing™ because like that we can see if there's a black mismatch.

[loukash]

35 minutes ago, loukash said:

That's the reason why the logo appears as dark gray in the Publisher.

Hm, I just noticed that the placed logo.afdesign (RGB) doesn't even appear on the Publisher page. It's somewhere about a meter out there on the spread…  If I scale it down so that it's visible, there is a slight tint shift compared to the afpub native K100. Whereas a placed logo2.afdesign that I have converted to cmyk before shows the same "soft proof tint" as native K100.

Nonetheless, that seems to be just a "cosmetic" issue: exporting as PDF/X-4 and checking the separations via Ghostscript (no Acrobat on Catalina but Ghostscript does this job fine for now), everything except the aforementioned rich black picture frame in the background separates as expected.