Black separates on two plates

[hughbd]

I'm a long-time prepress/graphic designer. I've run into a problem, and my searches have yielded no answers.

I place a grayscale .psd or .tif file in InDesign 3.0.1 and added some black type.

When printing to our in-house platesetter or our service bureau (both postscript level 3 Harlequin RIPs), the black type and grayscale .psd separate on two plates!

The problem can be run-around by exporting as PDF and printing as Composite Gray, however our service bureau doesn't accept PDFs. The service bureau is getting pretty annoyed at having to deal with this.

Anybody else run into this problem?

 

[robiNETpl]

hughbd,

I think you set ADDITIONAL type of your black - set it to BASIC

or convert all added to cmyk in INK MANAGER (CTRL+P/Output/Ink MAnager/Convert all to CMYK)

sorry, I only have polish version of InDi, but I hope you understand me

robin

Scripts for AdobeFamily

http://www.suwalski.pl/dtp

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Skype: indesignscripts

 

[jmgalvin]

It might be useful to go to Window menu/Output preview/separataions in ID and take a look to see how things look while you're working on the doc, saving some angry phone calls.

If you want, you could try printing a pdf form ID's print dialog and select, under Output/color: Separations - giving you 4 pdfs of individual seps.. You could see if things are separating properly into the pdfs.

You could also take a look at your Transparancy blends (edit menu) to make sure they're set to cmyk and your Transparancy Flattener presests (edit menu) to make sure they're set to High.

Also, you might check to see if the tiff has any compression, like lzw. It could be possible that the rip is not understanding the compression in the ID doc, while it might have understood it from previous apps.

 

[solarwarrior]

if you make your image a duotone black psd I think you will not have that problem.