Greys and blacks in four-colour printing (CMYK)

Fed up with your beautifully designed black solid coming out as dark grey in print? Here are some practical tips for achieving successful grey and black results in print.

Common technical issues

When looking at the printed result, you notice that:

• the black is too light
• there are white spots in the black
• the grey looks mottled
• the grey shifts towards blue, pink, green or yellow.

The solutions

To avoid this, greys and blacks should be processed in CMYK (four-colour printing). The overlapping of the 4 ink layers eliminates problems such as "hickeys", "voids", "dry spots" and so on.

IMPORTANT note: black must always carry the highest percentage of the 4 colours. If it does not, the grey will shift towards blue, pink or greenish-yellow.

We have put together the table of values below to help you maintain the exact equivalences between greyscale levels and CMYK greys.

IMPORTANT: from 10 to 50% black, it is preferable to keep the value as a pure greyscale without adding the 3 other colours. At these low percentages, even the slightest variation in ink density (± 4% tolerance) risks causing the hue to shift.

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