Rich Black or Spot Black for Two Plates?

[Designer Dale]

I am working on a logo that uses a spot (pms 192) and black as the only colors. I used the default black in Illustrator (rich black, not registration) and got magenta and yellow plates in my PostScript PDF. I know this came from the rich black, so I replaced all the blacks with a 100k spot black and got my two plates. I repeated the process using rich black and just turned off magenta and yellow of in the PostScript Ink Options. This gave me two plates also.
Which is better for the print shop?

 

[Blue Velvet]

Doesn't matter. A rich black is a CMYK split of various proportions or far more rarely, a double hit of K. My usual recipe is 40C 20Y 40M 100K which is a bit more neutral than the usual K+C mixes, but needs good registration on press if there's anything detailed knocked out of it.

Just use the K unless you want a spot black, like one of the Pantone Blacks.

But the fact is, is that as long as there's only two plates in the entire job, you can tell them to run those plates with any two inks you like, as long as they understand which one is which.

 

[zelmo]

BV is correct, if you feel you need a 2nd opinion.

Our press manager prefers a simple 40C bump behind black solids, which minimizes that pesky registration issue at the far corners and also keeps the black from looking on the browny side, which can happen with a substantial magenta screen thrown into the mix. Of course, if you're not printing in the CMYK space, this is completely irrelevant. Too each his/her own.

Just please, if you use a rich black, make sure the black is really 100%. I can't tell you how many times we've gotten a file where the designer spec'd rich black on a spot color job and the K channel is 95 or 98% or something. At 200 line screen or higher, you can really see that the black isn't solid, and no amount of ink is going to make it look good.

 

[Designer Dale]

Thanks all. The offending black was in the stroke at 98k. An easy fix.