CMYK Conversion with Colorsync

Nik - 02:24am May 14, 2008 PST

I'm having a very hard time converting my RGB PDFs to CMYK using ColorSync filters.

Since I'm no longer in the pre-press business, I'm hoping I can switch to lower cost design programs, such as Pixelmator, Lineform, etc. to handle my modest graphic design needs. Thanks to the universal support for PDF files, I can make my layouts in any program I want, and just give a PDF file to the printer.

Well, almost...

Where I'm running into problems is with CMYK conversion. I've created a high resolution PDFX-3 Quartz filter in ColorSync utility that also does a profile conversion to CMYK. This works fine, except for black generation. My RGB blacks end up as rich CMYK blacks rather than 100% CMYK black.

I've experimented with intermediate transforms to manage gray text and objects, but these still convert to improper blacks.

Is there a way to handle this, or will I have to get Acrobat just to have the "Preserve Black Objects" checkbox when I convert a file?

I know that I can let my print vendor handle the conversion in-RIP and, hopefully, manage black conversion appropriately, but some of my printers are less sophisticated, so I'd rather give them easier files to process.

Any ideas?

-- Nik

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