ink density inconsistencies

[karlik57615243]

hello!

I work on books for print in indesign and the ink density has to be at 300% or below. Usually this isn't an issue and can be resolved with some photoshop magic. However I have a book where when I check the ink density using the separations preview thing in indesign all the images have a high ink density that doesn't seem to change at all no matter what i do to the image in photoshop. I noticed today that in a crossover image (an image that is on spreads across two pages so it's split between two image frames so it appear normal in the binding when printed) one image frame didn't have a high ink density so i copied that image and pasted it into the second frame and the ink density went away. Please note that they are the exact same file and the same layers are turned on in indesign. Does anybody know what might be causing this issue? 

Thanks!

[rob day]

Hi @karlik57615243 , A CMYK image‘s total ink limit is built-in to the destination profile you use to make the conversion. So if you convert to a CMYK space like Coated GRACoL to total ink of the black point will be 330% unless you force an additional conversion into a different CMYK space with a lower total ink allowance.

For that reason it would be better to place profiled RGB images in InDesign and set your InDesign CMYK profile to a profile with a 300% total ink, eg ISO Coated V2 300%. Here I have a profiled RGB image in a document with ISO Coated as its CMYK profile assignment.

Here  my Document’s assigned CMYK profile is Coated FOGRA 27, which has a total ink limit of 350%, so the black in my RGB image is going to output at 350% when I export to that Destination profile

[Willi Adelberger]

To avoid this problem, unless use RGB images.

[Laubender]

Hi @karlik57615243 ,

also note that effects like a drop shadow with rich black multiplied on other elements stacked above placed images can higher the amount of ink above 300%. Even if you are using tagged RGB images and use a profile like eg ISO Coated V2 300%.

And it can also depend on your PDF export settings what will happen with the colors.

So always check the amount of maximum ink with your exported PDFs also in Acrobat Pro.

Screenshots below from my German InDesign 2022 where I used ISO Coated V2 300% for my document.

The applied drop shadow is done with a 100% rich black that consists of 60% Cyan and 100% Black set to multiply. The image below is an RGB image tagged with sRGB:

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )