Having too much total ink in your CMYK document is a pretty common problem. Sure, there is a total ink limit option embedded in your CMYK ICC profile but that doesn’t stop you from boosting the colours a bit more in Photoshop after a conversion to CMYK. You can quickly spot the locations that have too much ink by preflighting your PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro or other preflight software (Enfocus Pitstop is highly recommended too).
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Written for the Mac. Universal Binary for Tiger, Leopard, and Snow. This program opens a print ready pdf and will calculate the ink or toner coverage of the file. A perfect solution for needing to know approximately how much a print job will cost.
But what do you do once you discovered this issue? I’ve seen people tackle this problem using a range of options and noticed that just yanking the curves seems to be a popular choice. But the issue I have with this solution is that changing the curves or levels to lower the ink percentages always results in brightening the overall image, which makes sense because you’re just making the shadows visibly lighter. I want to use a solution that will change the total ink percentage without anyone noticing. Here’s a workflow you can use for this.
Step one: locate the problem pixels![]()
When you have your image open inside of Photoshop, your first task is to find where the problem is. You can use a Threshold adjustment layer to quickly pinpoint the darkest areas in your image.
Step two: measure what you have and get the total ink percentages
When you remove the Threshold adjustment layer you’ll notice that you get the actual CMYK values from your image. The numbers seem to be quite high and it’s a bit tiresome to do the math yourself here and add all these numbers together to get the total amount of ink. When you think there must be an easier way to do something there usually is. Notice the small Eyedropper icon with the tiny black triangle next to your reading in the Info panel? Click it and select Total Ink from the drop down list. Now you have the total ink percentages.
Step three: reducing the ink globally
Now it’s time to really get rid of a few percentages. For this we are going to use the Channel Mixer adjustment layer.
Step four: limit the change to the darkest areas
This next (and final) step is needed to hide our adjustment and change it from a global change to a local change.
Tip: remember you can always see your mask in full screen by ALT / OPT clicking on the mask thumbnail first.
When you click the Channel Mixer eye icon to make a before / after comparison you’ll notice that the image hardly changes visually but you still have a noticeable difference in your Info panel. And if needed you can always lower the individual channels a bit more to make this effect stronger, or you can duplicate your adjustment layer.
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December 2022
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