A.L. your not crazy, don't give up. The problem normally doesn't happen if you in swop, but always happens when you go into a gcr4 color space like used at some newspapers. Also, if the image has been saved as an eps, and the default button is clicked "Postscript color management" it will cause "Under-printing". The problem with going with a maximum black is that while this works great sometimes, especially if your just targeting black plus one other color. For instance, we use separation type GCR/maximum black generation when dealing with two color ads that Under-print (4-c black), to fix them not to under-print. It does not work well with photos. The Black gets very heavy and fills in. There are a few ways however to fix the under printing problem once it happens.

The first works when you have a white background.

1) select black image at the composite level, and copy.
2) then flick through the channels and hit dealt.
3) when you get to the black channel hit paste.

If there is color in the background, you can do this. Setting up and action key makes small work of this.

1) select the area that needs to be fixed.
then go to select color and choose black at the bottom of the list
2) change the amount to 100 percent and say okay.
3) do this a total of 4 times. this will make the amount of black on your page 100 percent.
4) then on the 5th time instead of adding 100 percent black, remove 100 percent of the CMY. This removes all the color at once.

the last and a very effective way to remove under-printing. (but again do not have photos selected when doing this) is to
1) select the area to be fixed
2) go to select color click on the text or what ever black you are fixing, and slide fuzz to get most all of it.
3) then go to selection modify and choose expand by 1 pixel
4) Copy at the composite level.
5) then flick through the channels and hit delete.
6) when you get to the black channel hit paste.

I have found this last way a very good way to get small under-printing black fixed so printers can register their image.

Also if someone is dealing with large amounts of pdfs that have photos to be fixed and nothing else. then use a program like "Iqeue" that won't cause the vector images/type to under-print, since it only targets the rasterised images.

Zombilly

Zom_billy

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Converting all Black to 100% black only