Best color format and profile for a greyscale newspaper printed in Europe?

[froehlich]

Hello,

I am working on a newspaper with greyscale only content printing it in Germany, Europe. I inherrited the previous edition from an Adobe Indesign user and it's color profile is set to CMYK/8 though this newspaper has always been greyscale.

Now I wonder if I should switch to greyscale/8 color format with Grey Gamma 2.2 for future editions or are there good reasons to keep it CMYK/8?

Who has experience in printing a greyscale newspaper and can advise me the best color format and profile combination for the task, please?
edit inspired by answer: I cannot ask printing shop in advance, because they change depending on best offer after I finished the newspaper.

Thank you so much!

Edited July 12, 2023 by froehlich
add information

[Komatös]

Hello @froehlich und willkommen im Forum.

Die beste Antwort wird die Druckei liefern können, denn die wird wissen, welches Farb-Format die Druckmaschinen benötigen.

 

The print shop will be able to provide the best answer, because they will know what color format the presses need.

[froehlich]

59 minutes ago, Komatös said:

The print shop will be able to provide the best answer, because they will know what color format the presses need.

Yes, of course you are right @komatös that the print shop will know best.

But the print shop is changing depending on best offer AFTER I finished the newspaper - what would be the best options from my production point of view for a greyscale news paper?

ty

[thomaso]

Ich weiß nicht, ob du deutsch sprichst, oder nur für ein Projekt arbeitest, das in D. produziert wird. So I countinue in English.

If the project got printed before with an ID document in CMYK then it can work to continue this way. We don't know, what colour space & what profile the former designers used to export the printing file. Even if PDF gets exported in CMYK it doesn't necessarily mean that the channels CMY are used at all, maybe the ID document contained Black only and thus the prepress process simply ignored CMY in a delivered CMYK PDF?

Concerning the profile (or Gamma in particular) I agree to @Komatös and recommend to ask the printing company. Regardless of the colour space the profile is meant to consider the paper and its handling with ink. The term "newspaper" can mean an ink absorbing paper or can get printed coated paper for offset printing … we don't know yet.

[froehlich]

9 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Ich weiß nicht, ob du deutsch sprichst, oder nur für ein Projekt arbeitest, das in D. produziert wird. So I countinue in English.

If the project got printed before with an ID document in CMYK then it can work to continue this way. We don't know, what colour space & what profile the former designers used to export the printing file. Even if PDF gets exported in CMYK it doesn't necessarily mean that the channels CMY are used at all, maybe the ID document contained Black only and thus the prepress process simply ignored CMY in a delivered CMYK PDF?

Concerning the profile (or Gamma in particular) I agree to @Komatös and recommend to ask the printing company. Regardless of the colour space the profile is meant to consider the paper and its handling with ink. The term "newspaper" can mean an ink absorbing paper or can get printed coated paper for offset printing … we don't know yet.

DE: Ich bin schon Deutsch Muttersprachler, doch Infos zu Affinity Publisher über Zeitungsproduktion sind selten, daher bin ich für English, damit die Infos mehr Menschen helfen können.
EN: I am German, but information about making newspaper with Affinity Publisher is rare and I'd like to continue in English so more ppl can make use of these information.

Thank you for the very important information that color space describes the project, while color profile is important for the paper! I wasn't fully aware of this (obviously I am a non professionell on this field). We print on ink absorbing standard newspaper paper.

I inherited the previous edition as Adobe Indesign file but just the design is important to continue not this file. Because I want to switch to Affinity products I created a new designer template and was just wondering about the CMYK color space of the old document.

For now I understand: It does not matter, if my template is CMYK/8 instead of greyscale/8 because CMY can be ignored during export.
Why this question about color format is so important to me are the photos and graphics - their conversion is time consuming. And I fear when working with CMYK/8 I might miss that sometimes there are rich CMYK blacks where there should be K-blacks only. So maybe I should turn my question into:

From logic I prefer color format greyscale - is there any disadvantage to work with greyscale/8 to prevent rich CMYK blacks? 
Does CMYK rich blacks not matter at all, because I can convert them during export as pdf to only K blacks? But what about the quality of the pictures - automatic conversion might make them too light or too dark? I prefer going without auto converting processes.

 Thank you so much, that you share your knowledge!

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, froehlich said:

But the print shop is changing depending on best offer AFTER I finished the newspaper - what would be the best options from my production point of view for a greyscale news paper?

This can be an indicator for the CMYK space of the former designers. Possibly they made the colour space / profile decision after creation and when the printer got chosen. If you ensure your Affinity document gets created with Black only (no CMY colours get used) then you can export finally with a specific profile and switch the Affinity document before export to grayscale with the "Assign" button active to maintain colour values of swatches (e.g. 100 K for text). (Note, different to ID Affinity doesn't offer an export option to preserve swatch colour values). – However, that's not a perfect or failure-free workflow. (compare the linked posts of @lacerto below).

4 hours ago, froehlich said:

We print on ink absorbing standard newspaper paper.

That makes a decision for a profile easier and allows you to use an according profile for the layout document already. But it doesn't prevent possible conversion of images in case you need to assign a different profile for the PDF export (or convert to a different profile for/during export).

4 hours ago, froehlich said:

For now I understand: It does not matter, if my template is CMYK/8 instead of greyscale/8 because CMY can be ignored during export.

No, ignoring CMY is just 1 aspect. In the total process the colour space matters because it influences especially pixel objects (images) and their required conversion, as you noted yourself correctly. But as long you don't know the printing profile your workflow can be an estimation or approximation only to a final print file and perfect adjustment for a perfect print result is not possible because of this last unknown parameter.

4 hours ago, froehlich said:

Why this question about color format is so important to me are the photos and graphics - their conversion is time consuming.

Not only because of time I personally would not convert colour images to grayscale before / outside the layout document, to avoid such a forced conversion step without knowing the final profile. I'd rather leave the conversion to the layout document and its export settings. Not only it saves the time for conversion of single image files but also maintains larger colour options for a later, final conversion. On the other hand, in case you have colour images, you may want to influence the conversion of single colour ranges individually, which is an argument to either convert before* the layout or do this step time consuming within the layout document (e.g. via non destructive adjustment layers). But again, for a perfect result you would need to know the printing profile, especially if printed on 'low quality' newspaper material.
* edit: therefore I would adjust / remove colour (hue /saturation) from the single image files but save them still as RGB for a later conversion to a specific grayscale profile.

This website https://www.color.org/chardata/drsection1.xalter lists short description for a range of various profiles and their preferred paper quality (+ detailed info if you click a profile name) and also links to various sites that deliver profiles (e.g. ECI, Fogra etc).

If you want to convert your photos and/or setup your Affinity document as grayscale then it may be useful to choose a profile for uncoated newspaper quality. Another alternative compromise for the layout document is the "Grayscale D50" profile which, as far I understand, actually is not a print profile but rather a screen profile (RGB) – or the "Generic Gray Profile" (which appears to be a very simple profile with 1 kB .icc file size only and applying Gamma 1.8).

Especially grayscale appears to be tricky in Affinity and often discussed. In my impression @lacerto is well experienced with such difficulties and unexpected behavior in Affinity and often does detailed tests plus reports them in the forum with detailed description and screenshots, for mac and windows if necessary. The forum has quite a few threads about 100 K and / or grayscale output and also the question if a layout document for print should get setup in RGB or CMYK is discussed several times – without a clear, unambiguous result (rather as a matter of individual preference, habit or taste).

Maybe these two examples can help to make a decision:

[froehlich]

Oh wow thomaso, thank you so much for this long answer full of useful information. You gave me some really interesting thoughts for complete new workflows e.g. when to convert what kind of photos - some are just so bad light and shadow quality that they need to be converted by hand into greyscale. But I might just keep standard media as CMYK-tiffs and auto convert or convert close to export for print.

Thank you so much for your input, you helped me a lot to sort my thoughts. I am not yet ready for my final decision, but I now feel comfortable having enough information to make one :-). Thanks also for the linked topics. I am surely going to reread this and the linked posts more often.

With your and your linked info that greyscale is internally handled as RGB and the idea of converting CMYK media after printing company is chosen I I think I keep CMYK/8 as color format and add my own template color palette including just K-tones. With this I should be well prepared to finalize the finished newspaper to a good result.

It will take several weeks to see how this turns out - I bookmarked me this thread and I hope to remember to report the final result!

Thank you @Komatös for your fast reply helping me to make my question clearer.

Thank you so much @thomaso for your massive input, hints and ideas!
 

[thomaso]

3 minutes ago, froehlich said:

converted by hand into greyscale. But I might just keep standard media as CMYK-tiffs and auto convert or convert close to export for print.

Note, you can turn the colours in an image to Greys without converting its space or changing its profile. The advantage of this way is in my eyes that a possibly required black ink only conversion (-> grayscale profile) does not happen twice. Just consider that greys created from 3 channels (RGB) may contain more detailed information for a final conversion to a grayscale than those with 1 channel only (black). Additionally, if you use a gray RGB image for CMYK printing than the result may appear better than just black ink would do.

Accordingly, personaIly I would not convert images to CMYK for the same reason: if they need to get printed with a different profile they get converted another time. Also, if disk space matters: In average a CMYK file is about 25% larger than an RGB file (4 channels vs 3 channels).

20 minutes ago, froehlich said:

add my own template color palette including just K-tones

If wanted you can use this grayscale palette (0-100 K in 5% steps, no spot swatches):   2 _ Grays _ K-only.afpalette

[lacerto]

In addition to what is already mentioned above, the following three points might be worth noting:

1) Newsprint process with mere black ink might benefit from using Adobe Dot gain profiles (if still available) if you want to get the tones right, when converting images to final color space (especially if doing something like this in a batch). I do not think that this can be done with standard grayscale profiles. Using Dot Gain 25% or Dot Gain 30% should be appropriate for a newsprint kind of job.

2) Whenever placing grayscale, indexed images with composite grays (equal R, G and B values), or monochrome images in a CMYK/8 mode document (one that is most versatile and useful to handle grayscale print jobs) -- all of which are handled as RGB images (8-bit per channel) -- use the K-Only button on context toolbar to guarantee that the images are handled properly as black-ink-only images (disregarding whether as K-values or grayscale values). This is important whenever using PDF/X export standards, since otherwise gray/K-only values will be converted to rich black (four-color blacks/grays) [when exporting to e.g. PDF 1.7, native values are normally retained].

3) Whenever placing AI or EPS CMYK files with K-only values, files without an embedded profile (= all EPS files and AI files saved without a profile), Affinity apps will assign the working CMYK profile to these files (ones defined in Preferences > Color), not the document CMYK profile. If the final CMYK target changes, these files need to be physically removed and placed again, while having the correct final CMYK profile defined in the Preferences. An alternative for AI files would be editing them and embedding the correct target CMYK profile. Notice the difference to Adobe workflow where embedded CMYK profiles are by default discarded and native CMYK values are simply passed through. Whenever placing AI files, there is behavior (buggy, IMO) in current 2.x versions that places linked AI files in "passthrough" mode, resulting in rasterization when exporting to production PDF. To make files interpreted (and keep the vector format and intended colors), instead, it is necessary to embed the placed file and change the status to "Interpret" (after which the file can again be linked, if wanted).

grayvalues_cmyk.afpub

[froehlich]

Thanks again @thomaso and @lacerto for your valuable input!

When starting this thread I did not have the idea this will change my whole process of color management and I am sooo happy I asked! I just did not have the idea to put media unconverted as is into my publisher document and care about converting as last step before exporting for the printing company. This idea makes so much sense now that you gave it to me - thank you so much!