I want to convert 4 Color Black to 100% K Black, but it keeps defaulting back

Just another nice Pages 5 "feature".

Do you still have Pages '08/'09 in your Applications/iWork folder?

Use that.

Peter

Elaine,

You need to know that Pages version 5.2 is not a part of iWork '09. You need to look for Pages 4.3. That's the one that will work the way you desire.

In Spotlight, enter Pages and choose the 4.3 version.

Jerry

Menu > View > Show Colors > Color Picker > Sliders > Gray Scale Slider > choose black swatch > drag to swatches below for future use by dragging onto whatever Text , object or color panel you want

Pages 5 seems to ignore any cmyk intent, therefore use Pages '09.

Peter

Peter,

If you use the left-most black swatch in the gray scale slider, and then immediately switch to the CMYK slider, one sees:

C:74 M:71 Y:64 K:87

when expecting:

C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:100

On the other hand, setting pure black with the CMYK sliders, enabling device CMYK, and dragging this 100% black to an empty swatch position, retains the pure black across Pages sessions. Any additional thoughts on this?

Do a quick experiment making 4 objects each 100% in turn C, M, Y and K.

You will find that selecting the object with the Color Picker open doesn't mean the Color Picker is showing what the color of the object is.

To compicate matters a Shape can contain text and whether a select object is the object or the contained text is hard to tell.

Just another example of the bad UI choices Apple is making these days.

You can bring up the Graphic Inspector to view the Fill swatch which does represent the color of an object. That can be brought back into the Color Picker by double clicking the Fill color.

If you have made the four C, M, Y K objects above, each 100% of the process colors, you can drag the sample colors down to your small swatch array under.

Add a fifth object and set the color the way I showed you using using the Grey Scale slider:

Click on the tiny rainbow icon to the left and choose Black & White so there is no element of doubt as to the color space.

Then change to the CMYK Sliders and you will see what OSX is doing. It is reinterpreting the color space of the pure 100% K to cmyk.

To follow all this through to print you can experiment by creating a page of color samples set as above (each object can have its own color space) then print that out to color printer using whatever software you choose to separate the output to the cmyk plates. Acrobat Pro and Adobe Illustrator can do this.

My tests show that the 100K stays 100K:

To help you keep better track of these and make it clearer you are making the right choices you can create your own named set of swatches:

Peter

Here so you can see the difference in applied color spaces.

First a CMYK color

Second a Grey Scale color

Excuse the mislabelling of the Grey Scale sample.

That should of course be 100% black.

In the Color Picker it goes by Brightness (luminance) so is 0% ie No light.

Peter

And again to show that working backwards from the sample on the page that OSX does pick up correctly what it is:

[The forum is playing up again so I have had to add the image in the next post].

You also have to Redefine the paragraph Style you are using with the new colour specification. otherwise it defaults back to the default colour of black. The style will be only for that particular document but in PAges 09 yo can import styles from other documenta or you save this document with the new style as a template.

fruhulda

The shame is that Apple hasn't done the logical thing and let you use named color swatches like it has with paragraph and object styles.

That would be the most secure way of ensuring you got the consistent color right, and could change it in one place.

Also the process of taking color sets from one System to another is unbelievable difficult and I'm not sure I've ever got it right.

How Apple stuffs up relatively simple tasks like this constantly leaves me scratching my head. It is like the engine, chasis and upholstery are fitted, but they can't be bothered with either a steering wheel or a manual!

Peter

Mmm, if you scratch your head you must be down to the neck by now! 😁😉

😁 🙂 😐 😮 _