Illustrator CC 2015

[kaiserwilhelm]

OK. On the latest Illustrator. Who knows what it is called.
Recently had HORRIBLE problems in Illustrator changing a RGB black to 100K. I mean beyond frustrating.
Is there some color setting I am missing.
1. open RGB Document
2. Change color space to CMYK
3. Select black object that is a value of all four colors
4. Click in color section and change to 100K
5. Stays the same!!!
Over and over and over. Takes me 20 minutes to create a color, put in 1 percent of something, and then fake it...Still doesn't work many times.
Baffling

 

[Tim-Ellis]

Hello,

That is really weird. I change RGB black to pure K all day long.

Can you zip up a file as an example?

 

[minder]

go to "Document Colour Mode" under "File" and change to CMYK, then change the black. Bit me in the but couple of times.
Hope this helps

 

[Dov Isaacs]

The latest version of Adobe Illustrator, fully updated, is the Creative Cloud 2015.2.1 release, aka Illustrator 19.2.1!

It is really a shame that beginning with Illustrator 9, other than for linked placed assets, a document is either all CMYK or all RGB. That has caused all sorts of problems for content than ultimately needs to be printed.

The major problem is that R=G=B is not recognized in Illustrator as really CMYK=(0,0,0,1-r). We have hacks to fix things like this in Acrobat printing, but not elsewhere to any real degree.

However, it should be noted that the RGB mode does permit colors defined as Grayscale and actually outputs same as DeviceGray in PDF! For PDF/X-4 files, DeviceGray=(g) => DeviceCMYK=(0,0,0,1-g). Any attempt to define a color as CMYK for a document in RGB mode really results in an RGB color definition. Uggh!

OK, what can you do about that. At least two possibilities based upon the ability to select “same ” for all objects of a particular color either for fill, outline, or both matching the currently selected object!

(1) The safest I would use would be to first define a grayscale swatch in your document while still in RGB mode as “100% K.” The, select one object that has RGB black, then use the select same tool to get the other objects that match in color and convert them all to that new swatch. Then convert your document to CMYK mode.

(2) The alternative would be to convert the document to CMYK mode, define a real CMYK black swatch (not the Black swatch that came in from the RGB document mode) and then use that same selection mechanism to find all the objects with the color you want to convert and change them to the new CMYK black swatch color.

Either way is obviously a pain in the tuchas if you are trying to convert a range of RGB pseudo-grayscale colors to either DeviceGray or DeviceCMYK although I suspect you could script something to apply a similar (if not painful) fix.

- Dov