Expert: Kamal Krishna - 6/4/2007

Question
I work for a magazine, and am relatively new to pre-press for ads.

I got an email from our printer saying that the black text in my ad file is 4c black instead of standard black.

Is there a way to change it to standard black in Photoshop? The last time this happened, I had to save all of the images separately, go back into Quark and redesign the ad there -- which I hate doing.

Any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.  

Answer
Hi Elizabeth,
You have to do little manual work here, but fortunately not entire re-design.

1) Open the document, Select the black text layer in the layers palette(f7)
2)In the tools palette, click on the 'foreground' color to open up the color picker.
3)First uncheck "Only web colors", then on the right, type zero beside C,M,Y percentages, and 100 for "K". and click "ok" to close the "color picker". This is the perfect black for offset printing.
4)Now that the text layer is selected press (Alt+Backspace), to fill in the black color onto the text layer.

Follow the same steps for all the text that should have perfect black.

Please let me know if you need further guidance.