Printing art book with rich blacks

A few questions before I weigh in:

First question, why they gave you pre-converted CMYK TIFFs to begin with. Unless they know exactly what press situation your are delaing with, that has the very definite possibility of "baking in" incorrect mixes. i.e. if they preconverted to an old profile like US Sheetfed, or even US Web Coared, which is so old and assumes a certain amount of press gain of "the day" that would make the blacks darker, you can very well get what I call "hollow" blacks now, as the press sitiations now are more accurate with less gain.

Is there a profile assigned to the CMYK TIFFS you were given? If you are viewing soft proofs on your screen (saving PDFs) where you are converting to a particilar Profile, you might be excasperating the problem.

"all the CMYK tiffs the artist sent me show as the 100K regular black"

This is troubling. Unless they were using a custom GCR curve with a Maximum Black assigned, this shouldn't happen.

Can you upload a small sample section of one of your problematic TIFFs?

Example below with a section of the original image vs print preview.

Hi @M.Rezvani , Without seeing your CMYK files it looks like you might have Overprint/Separation Preview turned on and Proof Colors on with the Proof Setup set to Document CMYK (your print preview?). If your InDesign document has the US Web Coated SWOP CMYK profile assigned and the CMYK image is also assigned US Web Coated SWOP, there is no need to turn on Proof Colors because Overprint/Separation Preview is already showing the expected US Web Coated SWOP soft proof.

I can replicate your captures by double proofing. These examples have the same CMYK output values, but the bottom soft proof is wrong because I have both Overprint Preview and Proof Colors to Document CMYK turned on.

If I export to the default PDF/X-4 preset Acrobat’s Output Preview uses the SWOP Output Intent profile for the default Simulation Profile, and the blacks are close to the SWOP 4-color black point:

InDesign can’t handle this for you. Photoshop could maybe help here, depending on your source files (TIFF? PSD?) If the black gradients are a separate layer, you could alter this layer/settings via batch processing or if that’s not enough, via scripting in Photoshop. For more help on this idea, it’s probably better to ask the question in the Photoshop sub-forum where the experts for this look at.

Unfortunately, there is no other way - you need to edit each TIFF individually - you can't just treat all TIFFs the same way or you'll end up with some TIFFs too dark or still too dull.

Hi @M.Rezvani , can you share one of the images? You should be able to attach one to your reply.

Are you sure this book is being printed on a web press, more likely on a sheet-fed press?

Don't use rich black for text, it'll probably reduce its readability. 

You cannot adjust the images in InDesign. If the images are RGB InDesign can convert them to CMYK on print or export, but it cannot greatly affect the colour in the images. This looks like a job for Photoshop.