Wrong colors when exporting my SVG

[Antoine.]

Hi everyone, I'm facing an issue with Illustrator, I want to export an svg file but with an image with a 100% black color.

By 100% black color I mean with no Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or with no Red, Green, Blue colors, just only the black. 

When I import this svg file to a PDF I can find these colors that I don't want.

My expected goal is an image with only black color :

There is a way to do it ?

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Exporting to SVG converts to RGB. If you want to keep black 100%, use Grayscale instead of CMYK black.

[Antoine.]

Even if I convert to grayscale still the same result 😕 Few days since I have this issue and don't know how to solve it.

[Laura Coyle.]

Make sure you are working in a CMYK file. You may need to start a new CMYK file in Illustrator, copy and paste the artwork from the SVG and save the Illustrator file as a PDF. It's hard to follow exactly what you are doing, but black is very different in CMYK and RGB, and that is the root of the problem you are having. Ton's suggestion about using grayscale for that black art, before you copy it into a CMYK document will work.

[Mylenium]

That doesn't make any sense. SVGs only support a very limited subset of CMYK options and as always none of this makes any sense without proper color management. It seems you are misunderstanding the capabilities of the format and the overall workflow, including importing it into a PDF and then running a separation preview. Again, this makes no sense at all. Since you haven't realyl explained what you are trying to achieve, we can't advise on specific alternatives, but the most obvious solution would be to export as a PDF right out of the gate.

Mylenium

[Antoine.]

All I want to do is to import an image with only black. It's a specific demand from our professional printer. I have 4 images that I can import in a PDF, 3 of them are in 100% black like I want, but it's images from internet, in my case the last one I want to import is from my enterprise in SVG but impossible to remove all colors even if I convert to grayscale or other color format. It's more easier to me to import in a PNG format but doesn't matter the file, in SVG, in PNG or directly import in PDF from Illustrator, colors are still here.