Ink reduction/saturation in Photoshop CS3

CB
Posted By
claire_boston
Sep 29, 2008
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285
Replies
5
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Closed
I need to prepare a document to be printed on newsprint. They recommend that the ink saturation be no more that 240% but in some of my images it is quite high.

Is there an easy way of checking the saturation of ink in photoshop, and then a way of controlling it? I don’t want to manually go through all of the images and fiddle with the colours, so is there a control panel that will do this (ie similar to the levels panel)?

Any suggestions welcomed!!!
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Carl_Stawicki
Sep 29, 2008
The best and easiest method would be for your printer to give you an ICC profile for the press. The ink limit would be built into the profile.

The second choice is to create a custom CMYK space in Photoshop where you can enter an ink limit of 240. The issue here is there’s a lot more to a profile than ink limit. You can get all the other specs from your printer (ink sets, dot gain, etc) to create your our custom profile.

Once you have a profile, you can convert the images to fix the ink limit.

Carl.
JD
John_Danek
Sep 29, 2008
I’m thinking two things:

1.) the printer does not have a profile;

2.) you might be able to create an "Action" via the curves dialog. The problem with newsprint is anything over 50%. You can determine where the levels are creating the problem using the Eyedropper, but I’d guess you’re going to have to lower the upper mids and shadows. CS3 has a hue/saturation adjustment that may also help and may or may not be incorporated into an "Action" where you might be able to "Batch" process the images.
CP
christoph_pfaffenbichler
Sep 29, 2008
Should the publication be printed in Europe by any chance »ISOnewspaper_26v4.icc« would probably be an applicable profile, downloadable at:
< http://www.ifraexpo.com/website/website.nsf/html/CONT_CONS_D L?OpenDocument&CTDL&amp >;
RM
Rick McCleary
Sep 29, 2008
…. and if you’re in the US, a good starting point is the SNAP profile. It has a TIL/TAC of 230%.

www.naa.org/docs/Tech-Ops/SNAP-2007.zip
CB
claire_boston
Oct 9, 2008
Thank you very much for all the helpful suggestions, i have now managed to sort the problem. I made a custom colour profile, that was exactly the same as the existing one, but capped the ink saturation at 240%. A few test files showed that it was working well, without any major colour dissimilarities.

Thanks again!

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