Expert: Elmer - 11/17/2010

Question
Hi,

So, I know we all have these RGB / CMYK issues but I have a question. I design my whole job in Corel Draw using CMYK palettes. I then "Publish to PDF" as per many printers instruction (and making sure the output is CMYK - BUT, when I view my files in PDF, the colours don't seem right. ALL my blacks are made up of the 4 colours and not just black??

I then did a little test where I typed some text and made a black square. Repeated the whole process and ta daaaa! Perfect! So now I duno... Could anyone please help with this problem! I'm guessing it has to do with the Publishing side somewhere??

Thanks!
Rudi

Answer
Hiya Rudi,
yes I know that this is very frustrating and it seems that no matter how hard you try you can never avoid this problem. I too have shared your pain in the past. Now I could go through configuring and altering elements and take you through the three hour prep involved in fixing and understanding why it happens. Instead I will give you a quick solution that has over the years saved me hours of unending stress.

Make your own cmyk colour palette for print.

Tools>Palette editor>new palette>name and save>add colour

If you don't have your calibrate colours on they will look completely rubbish.

Here are some cmyk settings that work best for me (C:M:Y:K = colour):

10:0:0:100 = black
100:90:10:77 = Navy Blue
70:10:0:0 = Cyan
30:0:100:0 = green
0:0:100:0 = yellow
0:100:100:0 = red
100:100:45:0 = purple

Other things you can do to prevent bad colours is to ensure that all gradients to black are edited also. for example dont go from red to black in a gradient, go from red to red with 100%black added to it. This will avoid that greying of colours that occurs.

Just keep on building up your own palettes and add colours as you need them. Custom colours always seem to avoid the conversion problems.

Finally always make sure when you are editing colours that in options value 2 is set to CMYK also.

I hope that this helps you avoid these issues in the future.

best of luck,

Elmer