I have been working with Illustrator for some time and I have had a lot of people ask about problems with the color black. There are several problems that can crop up when using black in Illustrator, understanding how to use the “Appearance of Black” settings should help clear this up. As a note, this setting also shows up in Adobe InDesign and is imporant. What do the “Appearance of Black” settings mean in human terms? Appearance of black is a setting in Adobe Illustrator that allows you to change how the color black is shown on your screen and how it is output to your printer and exported RGB images. What is “Rich Black”? Rich black is a deep black that is very dark. Regular black is a very dark grey. The difference mainly matters in printing. A typical rich black mixture might be 100% black ink, and 50% of each of the other three inks (Cyan, Yellow and Magenta). When you use the “Black” swatch in Illustrator, you get regular black (100%...

    Level: Intermediate (useful for advanced users) Description: This is a tutorial on how to minimize printing anomalies like banding and odd color variations. Incidentaly, this tutorial covers some photo correction technique which can be very usefull for adding detail back to images. Photoshop Version: CS2 (Can apply to Earlier versions up to Photoshop 7) Tutorial: I have come upon a technique for reducing printer anomalies (Banding, color patches and ghosting) that is really quite simple. When I say “banding” I mean where you visibly see color changes in a gradient or image as you can see here: When I say “ghosting” I mean areas of light color around dark color areas which shows up when printing but not on screen. An example is shown here: The main technique is to add enough noise. Adding noise to a gradient will reduce printer banding. This is also true for areas of solid color — adding a bit of noise can make the color print very even. When it...