Black is not Black

Howdy

I noticed recently that the 'black' swatch in my swatches palette is no
longer a pure 100K black. It has reverted to some bizarre black where
all the CMYK values are roughly 70%.. it's like a process black, but
it's a wussy process black. Is there a way to make that default black
swatch 100K again? Or, even better, is there a way to make it C100 M100
Y100 K100 and keep that preference even after I quit out of
Illustrator?

Thanks!
J

In article <1151342474.180717.133730.TakeThisOut@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
"j.makela" <MisterOwl.TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:

> Howdy
>
> I noticed recently that the 'black' swatch in my swatches palette is no
> longer a pure 100K black. It has reverted to some bizarre black where
> all the CMYK values are roughly 70%.. it's like a process black, but
> it's a wussy process black. Is there a way to make that default black
> swatch 100K again? Or, even better, is there a way to make it C100 M100
> Y100 K100 and keep that preference even after I quit out of
> Illustrator?
>
> Thanks!
> J

That sounds very much like a process printer's black. Process printers
are odd beasts that way. You might be picking it up from the file
itself, as the palette gets loaded. Any bitmaps with color info present,
perhaps? Color management being overly helpful? Format/color gamut
changes?

If it's the file itself, I'll just hint at resetting the color then
using select->same fill (or whatever) to tell it what's what.

Anyway, if you really want things to be done your way, start a new file,
load up your favorite palette(s), set your colors to taste, then save
over the template file - "Adobe Illustrator Startup_CMYK" (version 10
and up- make a backup first!) in your plug-ins folder- assuming you're
after a CMYK template, that is. You might require administrator
permissions to do so. Illustrator will use that as the default new CMYK
file template from then on, and all your favorite things will be there
from the git-go.

There's an RGB template file in the same location, same principle.

Of course, this method may be invalidated if you do color gamut changes
(i.e. converting from RGB to CMYK format after starting work on
something).


- Doug