Design's Tips: True Black vs Rich Black

Over the years of my collaboration experience, I notice that many young designers, who have very little to no experience with printing often have overlooked the importance of using an appropriate black before sending their designs out for printing.

Today, I'm going to discuss about 2 different of blacks; a simple topic and yet, always being overlooked by many people. Now what exactly is this true black and rich black?

A true black is comprised of 100% black only while a rich black is comprised of a mixture value of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black usually at this value (75 C, 68 M, 67 Y, 90 B) as derived from adobe photoshop to stimulate a richer-colored black when viewed on monitor in RGB mode.

Having submitting a printing file using a rich black creates a few problems:

1. Longer Time to Dry
2. Color Ghosting

1. Longer Time to Dry

When more layers of color are stacked together on a printing, it usually means it's going to take more time for the ink to get dry. This indirectly causes another problem that is color smudging.

Your prints will be stacked on one another before the inks are dried. Without doubts, most if not all of your printing might be spoiled and deemed unusable. You may think that "Okay, that only happens in offset printing but how about digital printing?"

In digital printing, you will not have the problem of ink smudging on the printings but it usually cause papers to be jammed inside the printer. An ideal color combination of CMYK should be not more than 50% for each color at the same time. 

2. Color Ghosting

The main culprit of this so-called "Color Ghosting" is normally caused by misalignment of every color plate/film for offset printing or drum cartridges in the digital printing. Therefore, whichever printing method is opted for, this problem will occur.

Such a problem will be magnified further when a rich black or too many color combinations of CMYK  are used. Here is a sample of Color Ghosting caused by mis-alignment of plates or drum cartridges:

Both designers and printing operators should do their part to reduce the problem to minimal. The printing operators should be doing alignment checking on their machine carefully before starting to print. For everyone's information, no matter how accurate the alignment is done, it is still likely to have very microscopic misalignment to occur. Therefore, it would be wise to choose the application of the colors wisely for the design.

If you have questions, feel free to drop it at the comment area. I would love to hear it out.