Rich black is sending me to the funny farm.

April 13, 2009 5:35 PM

I have been having a pervasive printing error that I, as a professional should know how to avoid/solve but I can't seem to stop cutout images from printing richer than the surrounding color. Let me explain...

OK, so say you have a hat photographed on black velvet in a way that it is pretty much black as black can be. You want to make a flyer where the entire thing is black. So you take it into Indesign and make a black square, then place the hat graphic (.psd) on top of it.

When it prints, however, you break out into tears. The borders of image is evident because it printed in rich black and the black square is just plain ol' black ink. You take it back into photoshop and erase the black background so now you just have a hat. But, lo and behold, the damn thing still prints rich black where the borders of the image are.

You decide to go with the hat on a yellow background. The yellow under the image prints out a slightly different shade of yellow.

So, am I supposed to make a clipping path around every single item I place on a colored background? Some of these images I use are of historic fur artifacts that wouldn't take well to a clipping path to eliminate rich black.

More details:

1. I am printing on an HP Laserjet 5550dtn PS
2. I am outputting all blacks as rich black. Doesn't seem to be working
3. The blacks are registration
4. I have run a test page with the same image as a CMYK with black background, CMYK without, RGB without, greyscale without, and a CMYK with clipping path. The only one without a rich black square around it was the clipped one.
5. There are no text effects
6. I read This post but it did not help me.

I think my options are:
1. reinstall print drivers. Maybe it was set up wrong.
2. Do something obvious in InDesign or Photoshop that my idiot brain can't figure out
3. switch careers
4. kill myself
5. switch careers, then kill myself
6. win the lottery

posted by Foam Pants to media & arts (15 comments total)

So, if I understand this correctly, you're trying to get the black from the velvet to transition smoothly into the black of the background you created in InDesign?

There's every chance that the black background in the photo isn't perfectly uniform, and what I've done in cases like this is to create a border around the hat or other central figure in the photo and fill it with the same uniform color that you plan on using for the background in the InDesign document, or, conversely, set the InDesign fill to the color you made in Photoshop. Feather the edges of the border so there isn't a sharp division between the fill and the velvet background.

One trick to finding a good fill color is to use Average (Filter ->Blur ->Average filter. This will take the average color value of all the selected pixels and create a fill. Take the generated color value and fill the InDesign background with it (don't use the eyedropper tool, enter the color values manually).
posted by lekvar at 6:07 PM on April 13

Also, make sure you're using the same colorspace for both the .psd and the .ind files.
posted by lekvar at 6:08 PM on April 13

what version of creative suite are you on? this used to happen a lot more but they've fixed it slightly. try making a pdf of it and looking on-screen. do you still see the box? sometimes this happens with our (very expensive) fiery at work but it won't show up on a swop proof or on press. i don't know what causes it. it's always when there are photoshop images layered on top of other things. the black velvet probably wouldn't transition to a tint of black simply because there are variations in the velvet that the black tint wouldn't have. but if you are clipping out the hat it shouldn't be a problem. maybe a workaround would be to make the bounding box of the .psd file the same size as the document? so it's uniformly distorted? but seriously trying making a pdf and see if it still happens. if not, it may not make a difference when you go to press. but if your output IS the final piece, then yeah, try making the bounding box bigger.
posted by apostrophe at 6:31 PM on April 13

sorry, reading comprehension issues. the one with the clipping path worked. i thought you had a different issue. yes, you need to clip it out. OR clone the velvet image to extend it so it fills the page.
posted by apostrophe at 6:35 PM on April 13

A quick fix might be simply using the gradient feather tool in InDesign to fade the edges out to transparency. Very similar to lekvar's trick. It's under the Object>Effects menu. You can adjust its properties and should be able to get an acceptable fade between the two "blacks."

"The borders of image is evident because it printed in rich black and the black square is just plain ol' black ink. You take it back into photoshop and erase the black background so now you just have a hat. But, lo and behold, the damn thing still prints rich black where the borders of the image are."

This last bit seems to suggest that you are getting a thin black border around the placed PSD file even after making the background transparent in Photoshop. Sometimes this can happen if you use the magic wand tool and then feather the edge. Photoshop will feather around the outside of the canvas as well, depending on how you do it. Try cropping the image in after doing the the transparency step.
posted by hamandcheese at 7:17 PM on April 13

You can circumvent this two ways:

1. Set up the entire page background in Photoshop with the images in place and place the whole thing in InDesign, then do your text in InDesign. It's a pain to flip back and forth between Photoshop and InDesign if you have to move things around, but it will definitely work.

2. Dump trying to match the image background color to the page background color and do something with contrast.
posted by MegoSteve at 7:19 PM on April 13

I, too suspect a colorspace mismatch but eliminating the opportunity for mismatches to occur via MegoSteve's suggestions may be the simplest workaround.
posted by bz at 8:29 PM on April 13

On my test images, I eliminated the black background entirely and then, for the ones that were going to be testing as a black square, I created a black layer in the background of the images and saved it. That way, the black would be truly black. What I don't get is the greyscale coming out as rich black. That should not be happening at all.

Fading out the image to transparency will create a rich black center with a greyscale black outer edge, also bad.

I am hoping that a clipping path on every single image I produce is not the answer. I mean, how am I to make a clipping path on an elk fur-crested hat? And, no, this is not a rare instance for me. I work with images of fur shot on black backgrounds a lot. If I create a clipping path for that, it is going to look like a rich black ring is going around the hood of every parka image I use.

When I make a PDF of the image, usually the problem is not present but, print it, and it does it again. I am not sure if this is the product of the printer I am using or the program I used to make the PDF.

I am not getting a border, I am essentially getting enriched color where the image is and plain black were the image isn't, doesn't matter if the image background is black or transparent.

I am using CS3 Design Suite on a Windows machine.

Creating a background on the image the size of the finished piece will most likely be a solution that, in the long run, causes a different kind of headache.
posted by Foam Pants at 9:29 PM on April 13

Don't do it with clipping paths. Change your background later in PS to a regular layer (double-click, it'll become layer 0). Use the wand tool in photoshop to select only the black background. Refine selection using Quickmask and delete it. You should see the grey + white squares showing that the layer has transparency where there was black. Save as a PSD and import into InDesign. Whatever background you put it on will show through where the transparency was. I'm sorry if I misunderstood what you're trying to do, but if a clipping path worked, this should work better. Message me for any more info.
posted by TochterAusElysium at 9:38 PM on April 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oops - should have typed "background LAYER" not "later" in the second sentence.
posted by TochterAusElysium at 9:39 PM on April 13

I am doing just that, Tochter, as my regular workflow. I am using the lasso tool to get a good selection, then erasing the black. When in Indesign, the entire area of the image, whether it is visible or transparent, is coming out rich black. If I place the transparent backgrounded image on another color, like a dark gold color, the gold under the entire image is slightly off. Some colors work better than others but it is a pervasive problem.

I haven't futzed with color spaces. I plan on trying that tomorrow.
posted by Foam Pants at 10:09 PM on April 13

I don't have access to the software right now to mess around, but is it at all possible that some selection or layer setting is slightly off? As if you were deleting at 99% opacity instead of 100%? Having even a slight colour transparency over process black would probably make Indesign export that portion as rich black. Maybe not the most likely answer, but it would explain what's going on.

Based on everything you've said I'm thinking it's something like this in Photoshop, or its a driver problem. And the driver problems are completely out of my league...
posted by hamandcheese at 10:41 PM on April 13

(I fix printers, so I know the hardware end of things. But not so much the software end of things. Please excuse my ignorance and/or different perspective. By the way, despite your current troubles, I envy you for having that printer.)

Maybe this is what the other commenters meant by colorspace mismatches, but perhaps your software is telling the printer to print the not-so-black areas as c100 m100 y100 k0 instead of c0 m0 y0 k100? Or vice versa? What if you create four layers of background- y100 then c100 then m100 then k100, that are opaque, and then superimpose the image on top of that? Maybe the act of physically laying down a couple layers of color under the black toner will make the black appear more rich?

(What's the difference between "black" and "rich black"?)

And/or, are you using real HP cartridges? Is your black cartridge failing? In theory, if the printer is working right, a sheet of black ink should be as black as you can get. What do the color test patterns look like? If I remember correctly, that printer should have something called print quality troubleshooting pages, which if memory serves, should print pages of solid color as well as halftones. Also the color test patterns should show what the printer will produce when commanded to print a certain color. Look at these and start your troubleshooting there- if solid black isn't really solid, something is going on in the printer. You can turn on "diagnostics mode" and what that will let you do is switch the cartridges into different spots without triggering an error, and then print the troubleshooting pages again. Does the image defect stay with the pages printed in black? That means the cartridge is bad. Does it "move" to whichever color you put into the black slot? Then you have something weirder- maybe a transfer belt.

If the printer is producing the colors correctly from its control panel, at least you know you've eliminated it from the equation. (Mostly- check for any "intelligent" modes that might be turned on- ReT or economode or "substitute colors" or weirdness like that.

Try using a completely different software setup to see if the results are the same- use Paint to knock up an image like your messed up one and see what it does.


(Or, are you having color correction issues? Did you calibrate your monitor in a way that's futzing with what it sends to the print driver?)
posted by gjc at 5:12 AM on April 14

Did you check to make sure the item is trapping properly? Sounds like you're getting a thicker border because it's trapping to the background.
posted by cass at 7:18 AM on April 14

A small miracle has happened. I fixed it. It doesn't solve why I can't get rich black out of an object created in Indesign BUT it solves the rich black boxes around my objects which is the heart of the matter. This page I found helped me think of some new ideas.

I ended up modifying a setting in my HP printer through the print window in Indesign.

Print > setup > preferences > color options: manual: settings > photographs: neutral greys: black only

The default was four color which would explain why even the greyscale image was coming out rich black.

I am comforted that it is a printer issue rather than an Indesign issue. While I haven't had a problem with the rich black boxes showing up on professional print jobs, now that anxiety will go away completely. Two year, TWO YEARS this has been going on.

For those of you who want to see the before and after I took a crappy picture of them with my iphone
posted by Foam Pants at 2:26 PM on April 14