Greyscale jpegs or psd images are going much darker when dropped in on indesign.

Question

Hello,

I am working on the insides of a book that is illustrated with black and white images. The illustrator, however, forgot to supply greyscale images. When I convert her CMYK images to greyscale, there is more or less no change on photoshop. However, when I drop the new image in InDesign, it is MUCH darker. I can't leave it like this because the images will print too dark and not read well. I've tried converting JPEGs and PSDs and I have the same problem when importing on indesign.

The colour settings appear to be the same.

Indesign:

(Settings) Europe General Purpose 3

(Working Spaces) RBG - sRGB IEC61966-2.1

(Working Spaces) CMYK - Coated FOGRA39 (ISO 12647-2:2004)

(Colour management policies) RGB - Preserve Embedded Profiles

(Colour management policies) CMYK - Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles)

(Conversion Options) Engine - Adobe (ACE)

(Conversion Options) Intent - Relative Colourimetric

'Black Point Compensation' is ticked.

Photoshop:

All the settings are the same as on InDesign.

(Working Spaces) Gray - Dot Gain 20%

(Working Spaces) Spot - Dot Gain 20%

I've attached an image of how I see the image on photoshop v. how dark it gets on indesign so you can see.

Does anyone know how I can fix this? Any help would be much appreciated.

Juliette

rob day · Accepted Answer

InDesign does not have grayscale color management. It displays grayscale images as they will print on the Black CMYK plate when you have Overprint Preview turned on. With Overprint turned off grayscales are displayed as sGray (2.2 Gamma), which is useful for screen only projects.

If you turn on Oveprint Preview the grayscales will preview using your document’s assigned CMYK profile—Edit>Assign Profiles... Here are some related threads:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/exporting-rgb-cmyk-and-grayscale-to-print-pdf/m-p/10990825?page=1#M179498

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/dot-gain-or-gray-gamma/td-p/8365606?page=1