Gray swatch: black show different numbers

[Bryce]

Depending on the screen you are in Black and the gray category shows up differently - and separates differently. 

You can see here that I have 15% black selected in the "Gray" swatch. I noticed that it always uses CMY&K when in the color sliders studio when it should be just K. Now if I make my own swatch Black stays in K. If I go to edit any of the colors in Gray it shows the correct percentage in black, even though the studio shows it's not.

 

The document is in CMYK - which is what we always work in since we are a print shop. We can easily fix the problem by making sure we do not use the "Gray" pallet and just use our custom colors, but it is a little annoying knowing I can't use gray. Just having it show up two different ways in two of the sliders is puzzling.

Can a swatch internally be listed as RGB even though it's got CMYK sliders and the document is in CMYK/8 in the setup?

What's the answer here other than to delete the gray swatch and recreate it?

 

[walt.farrell]

The swatches maintain the colorspace they were created in, and I believe the Gray swatches are RGB, not CMYK, @Bryce.

[thomaso]

10 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I believe the Gray swatches are RGB, not CMYK,

How does such a default predefined Grey know then to show as K-only in the sliders of swatches panel? And if it knows obviously, why does it not output as such it pretends to be? Or is the K-only property a lie? But then for what purpose?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

How does such a default predefined Grey know then to show as K-only in the sliders of swatches panel? And if it knows obviously, why does it not output as such it pretends to be? Or is the K-only property a lie? But then for what purpose?

Good questions.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Good questions.

One more: for what purpose do all these nice "Add Chord to Swatch" options generate useless swatches if you are in a CMYK document color space + have a CMYK color definition selected? They seem to produce RBG swatches only, regardless of both document and color selector type. Some of these chords even result in swatches with mixed color spaces, for instance some in HSL, some in CMYK. – Does not appear as "by Design" nor to be a missing feature. ugly buggy.

Tints of 100 K in a CMYK document:

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the questions. I don't have time to consider this right now (and would really appreciate more insight from those with more experience than I have).

One thought prompted by your latest question @thomaso. Does the "lock colorspace" toggle on the color panel have an effect in this area?