Black background

Hi Judy,

We recommend sRGB for the vast majority of people. We have a help page on Black and White Photo Printing which explains some details.

You can set your jpeg's to "Greyscale" in Photoshop and that works great. Using CMYK is a really advanced. Almost always, photos converted to greyscale in CMYK uses all colors (CMY) to create levels of black instead of just K. This is because RGB has all colors for it's black levels, and the CMY is doing the exact same thing as RGB. Greyscale removes all color information and uses just K.

I am getting so confused here. Aren't we supposed to upload pages in RGB? There have been a ton of posts on uploading in RGB, 300 ppi, jpeg etc... I've done a lot of books that are black and white, and then others with just a black background (default black in photoshop) and the results have been amazing. I'm getting a reprint of my black and white WWII book and am wondering if I should upload the pages in CMKY, or only the RGB ones as CMKY and then leave the rest as greyscale RGB?

Judy

You want a black background for a color picture that is different than a black and white picture. You just need to create the background as black and that black will be created using CMYK instead of just black.

Hi, I'm kind of a novice, in the stage of creating my .pdf to upload (creating photoshop files and then converting to .pdf)... If you save an image as "greyscale," doesn't that take away the color and make it b/w? If so, is there a way to make "true black" backgrounds for a color picture? I totally didn't understand the last post with the CYMK values. uh....any ideas? thanks!

Kim, I believe you may be asking about rich (or super) black backgrounds for your pages. 100% black will look grayish and flat. It needs at least another color to give the black more body. Most printers will have different CYMK proportions to achieve a blacker black. Try C40 Y30 M30 K100 or C40 Y10 M10 K100 on a test page. The old standby is C40 K100.

Hi Kim,

You can insure complete black by using jpg's with the Greyscale colorspace. The transparent .png thing may work but has more moving parts. straight jpg's in greyscale will guarantee the printer will only use black.

I want to do a book where all pages are an image and white text on a black background. I have been told the background will have a grayish color cast if I upload black pages. Is this true. Can I upload .png files with transparent backgrounds and choose a black paper?