How do I adjust dot gain?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
July 9, 2019
4 replies
8175 views

Hi, a newspaper has asked me to adjust an illustration to allow a 30% dot gain. While I understand what this means and I know it has to do with colour profile presets, I don't know how to address the request. Is it possible to do this without leaving Illustrator or should I go into Photoshop? The image has no photos. Also, they are requesting not to exceed a 230% ink weight, and I am completely lost in this last part.

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J

jdanek

Inspiring

If I am not mistaken, Illustrator's color setting allows 20% dot gain, so you only need to knock down the color values 10%.

meganchi

Legend

If you save out a pdf of your art, then you can open it in Acrobat. Use the Print Preview tool in order to see total ink coverage.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

You can achieve this by converting your artwork into an appropriate color profile when exporting it to PDF. In order to work well, this of course requires that your color management is set up accordingly.

BUT: your artwork most probably is designed in CMYK (since you will be printing it). An ICC-profile based conversion from CMYK to CMYK will wreck your blacks and make them muddy.

What kind of design are we talking about?

Amadís15939492Author

Inspiring

Thank you for replying, Monika. The design has no real black, but I'll have to adjust the darker shade. Is there a way to precisely observe the percentage the newspaper requests? If not, which colour profile should I choose?

Mike_Gondek10189183

Community Expert

You can disregard 30% to fix this, you just need a 230% max ink weight, DMAX or maximum density. First please tell us exactly what your blacks are filled with?

So you need 230 DMAX, you could chaneg the black fill to 100 K for a 100DMAX, btu your black will look like a dark brown and show pinholing where the tiny paper fiber are not as abosrbant.

I would fill those somewhere between 100k 40c 40M 40Y for a neutral rich black of 220 DMAX or 100k 20C 20M 20Y for160 DMAX. If you make the blacks look to glossy & rich they will pop too much and especially on logo look unbalanced. Wont look bad either way so don't overthink.You cannot do much about the ink priming the page to avoid pinholing in other colors, but if you don't go too dark on rich black they can increase ink pressure overall.

If you know what Anilox roller and line screen please post. Don't worry if not, printing quality is so much better nowadays, my conmments might be overkill. But every pressman appreciates an easy job, and less environmental waste getting pressrun primed.

Thanks for posting your art, as you can see our comments get so much better if we see the art. I encourage posters to do that with every post.

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

Amadís wrote
Also, they are requesting not to exceed a 230% ink weight, and I am completely lost in this last part.

I am by no means a print expert, but this part means the combined values of CMYK should not exceed 230% (i.e. 100C + 30M + 30Y + 0K = 160% ink weight).

Amadís15939492Author

Inspiring

Thank you, Doug! That was very helpful.

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