Understanding ink limits in Photoshop
Ink Limit is the amount of Ink of each color you put on the paper when printing. If your color in a document is 100% Cyan, 100% Magenta, 100% Yellow and 100% Black – you have a 400% ink limit (sometimes called density). Understanding and adjusting your ink limits can improve the quality of your printed piece. MOST commercial printers like to have between 280%-300% ink limit. That means that if you want a nice deep black, you can run something like 60% cyan, 60% magenta, 40% yellow and 100% black – which is a 260% ink limit (or density). Using a higher ink limit, such as a CMYK setting of 100% of all four colors, will generally result in a muddy image, or wrinkled paper. At the very least, you may experience ink offset and extended dry times on your print job. Read on for more on ink limits. You access Ink Limit information in Photoshop by going to Edit>Color Settings and in the Working spaces area, you click the CMYK drop down menu and select Custom CMYK. In this box you can see an area to enter in an ink limit and dot gain. Optimal settings are usually in the range of this:
- Ink Colors: SWOP (Coated)
- Dot Gain: Standard 20%
- Separation Type: GCR
- Black Generation: Medium
- Black Ink Limit 80%
- Total Ink Limit 300%
- UCA Amount: 0%
The Black Ink Limit tells photoshop that the darkest black can be up to X%. If you change that setting to something like 70%-80% you will find that when you convert the image to CMYK, any area that was 100% black will only be 70%-80% black. This results in more detail in the darkest areas of an image. All these settings occur when you convert an image from RGB to CMYK. If the image is already CMYK, there’s not a whole lot you can do to adjust it automatically; though you could still make adjustments with Selective Color or Levels. Your safest bet is to use the North America General Purpose 2 in the Settings drop down menu. Then change the CMYK drop down menu to U.S. Sheetfed Coated v2 and save your settings. The reason you don’t want to just leave the CMYK setting as it appears under General Purpose is that it defaults to a Web press setting. Most print work is done on a sheetfed press.
2 COMMENTS
Linda, ask presscenter for color profile to convert ur file to, or .job file to print ur file to pdf.
Question; my files are now saved as US Web (coated) SWOP v2. My opacity levels on the darkest areas are around 290. When I convert to Sheetfed as recommended above, they jump up to almost 340. What is the ink limit on the default Sheetfed profile? Will it clip it a 300 or do I need to go into Custom CMYK? My client may have issues with that. But I am worried it will cause problems on the press.
What do you suggest?
thanks,
Linda
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