Illustrator Color in Illustrator

[agentmoeller]

Ai driving me crazy. The pupil in the screen shot is clearly BLACKER than the lines surrounding it.

But Ai says they're all CMYK black, #000000.


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

 

[SPWA]

I have experienced this before. Although they are both "supposedly" CMYK black, they do have different values which can be edited. I would give you the exact solution but I don't have my PC with me at the moment to easily explain. Try this link, I hope it helps.

Appearance of Black in Illustrator.

 

[agentmoeller]

I read the link - thanks. Problem is, I have my preferences set to always display and print in rich black. Just to test it out, I made a rectangle with black fill (#000000), and a circle iniside with the same fill color. The rectangle reverted automatically to 100K black, #231f20, but as you can see, they are both displaying as pure black on the monitor.


?????????????????????????????

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Agent -

re your statement: "...but as you can see, they are both displaying as pure black on the monitor..."

On my monitor, the two areas are clearly different. Also, when I measure them with the eyedropper tool, they measure out to be rgb = (0,0,0) outside, and (13,14,16) on the inside of the circle.

If, on your system, both areas appear visually to be the same, and also measure out to be the same, then the first place I would look for a problem would be in your monitor profiling and calibration.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[agentmoeller]

Tom, I thought about monitor issues as well. They read as different colors in the color picker, but on my monitor the look almost indistinguishable. Problem is, on the first attachment, you can see a clear difference between rich black and 100K black, which I normally do see any time I'm working with black.

I'm perplexed.

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Agent - AFAIAC, the AI option that you are using, ie, "display and print as rich blacks" is the devil's own work, LOL, and should rarely, if ever, be used. IMHO, this setting causes vast amounts of confusion, especially when coupled with possible monitor calibration problems.

Instead, try this little experiment:

a) First, if you have a hardware calibrator, re-calibrate your system before you do anything else.

b) Read My Old Post In This Thread, open AI, and as stated in that post, set your preferences to "Display All Blacks Accurately" both for on-screen display, as well as when printing and exporting. Then open a new test AI document using those preferences, re-do (from scratch), your filled-circle-inside-a-rectangle test, and see if most of the problems that you've been having go away.

The reason I said, "most of your problems", not "all of your problems" is because of your statement, "...They read as different colors in the color picker, but on my monitor they look almost indistinguishable..." yet I observe them to be clearly different both to my eye, as well as when I use an eyedropper in Firefox, or if I download your image and use PS's eyedropper. AFAIK, the only way you can be seeing one thing, and I am seeing something different is if one of us has a monitor calibration problem. Prompted by this thread, I just re-calibrated my monitor. There was almost no change from my last calibration, so I'm pretty sure that what I am seeing is correct, whereas I suspect your system is slightly clipping your blacks when displayed, and that, coupled with the AI preferences you had been using is what caused your problems.

Obviously, there are other things that could be wrong, but why don't we see if we can land a hole-in-one solution, LOL.

Cheers,

Tom M

 

[agentmoeller]

Still having very bizarre behavior problems in Illustrator with blacks. The objects I create seem to magically jump from rich black (#000000) to 100K black or whatever spontaneously. I have to keep changing them back, some objects more than once. Can't figure this out.

 

[RENDERMAN]

Agent, check in your settings if you have RGB Back VS CMYK back. Sorry I wasn't explicit, you must chose CMYK black

 

[Tom Mann]

The issue of the various types of blacks in Illustrator has been discussed earlier in this thread. Could you show us (say, by means of screen shots) exactly what you mean and how this differs from what has been suggested earlier to the OP.

Thanks,

Tom M

 

[RENDERMAN]

There are several type of blacks in Illustrator but try double clicking on the black swatch with these default values and let me know if it worked, what version of Illustrator are you using?