Black text - overprint or not?

[Made in Taiwan]

A few days ago, I had an issue with black text and yellow stroke. The Text was 60pt., 100K and set to overprint and the stroke was 100Y, lying halfly outside the text and halfly under the text. In the overprint preview in Acrobat, it looked like the text color would be heavily influenced by the underlying yellow stroke (see attached image). So I've decided to set the text to knock out again.

Well, in the aftermath I've kept thinking. The result was good, but how would it have looked if I've really kept it on overprint? Can anyone of you share some experience with me about this kind of case? Would the black text really be influenced that heavily? How about other examples, like a big 100K rectangle on top of a red/white chessboard pattern, for example? Pitstop has an option to not overprint text bigger than how many points, does anybody use this option? If yes, which font size do you use?

[Joe]

Yes indeed black set to overprint will allow the underlying tone to "show through" and it will affect the look of the black. And yes you would probably see the squares in the black over the red and white rectangles. We force black overprint on text that is 12 pt. and smaller and force knockout under anything larger than 12 pt.

[frailer]

Not quite what you're discussing, but we have to watch for this a bit with our stuff. Dezinger had this OP'ing on the red shirt. may have worked, as red was pretty homogenous, but would have had the 'warm' tinge, which tends too look a bit crap.

So KO'd it and added 40C. Damn PitStop.. so good, so quick.

... was outlined Text, of course, in this case.

[Made in Taiwan]

Thank you, Joe and Frailer!

Been curious about this question for a bunch of time already... I'll adopt the 12 pt rule directly. And bigger areas will be set to KO.
Special thanks to Frailer for giving me the example with the red shirt, this would have been something I'd probably (definitely) do wrong, too.

Always cool to have you guys around, otherwise I'd be lost here with nobody to tell me. Guess at least half of what I know so far I've learned from here.

(By the way, I also like Pitstop. Just finished an action list to change the page box layout for saddle stitching, but that's another story...)

[mwc]

Yes indeed black set to overprint will allow the underlying tone to "show through" and it will affect the look of the black. And yes you would probably see the squares in the black over the red and white rectangles. We force black overprint on text that is 12 pt. and smaller and force knockout under anything larger than 12 pt.

Agreed. Although we have set our auto-tolerance for black overprint to 24pt and below. All depends on the artwork, but this has worked well for my (employers) shop.

[David]

Not quite what you're discussing, but we have to watch for this a bit with our stuff. Dezinger had this OP'ing on the red shirt. may have worked, as red was pretty homogenous, but would have had the 'warm' tinge, which tends too look a bit crap.

So KO'd it and added 40C. Damn PitStop.. so good, so quick.

... was outlined Text, of course, in this case.

We had one similar to this, except that the customer wanted it to overprint and look wierd...  go figure.

[born2print]

I am on board with all this. I would add that if the type gets REALLY big, we make it rich black.

[frailer]

Not quite what you're discussing, but we have to watch for this a bit with our stuff. Dezinger had this OP'ing on the red shirt. may have worked, as red was pretty homogenous, but would have had the 'warm' tinge, which tends too look a bit crap.

So KO'd it and added 40C. Damn PitStop.. so good, so quick.

... was outlined Text, of course, in this case.

We had one similar to this, except that the customer wanted it to overprint and look wierd...  go figure.

Exactly my predicament on this one yesterday. We don't get lasers very often now, so don't really know 'what it's meant to look like'.
I let this go mainly because, well, I didn't notice it, but had to fix it to KO, of course.
But by the sounds, your dezinger on that one would have preferred the OP one.    :tongue:

[Joe]

If it is white text and they want that to overprint they better tell us up front because Prinergy automatically changes all whites to knockout.

[frailer]

Yes I recall that as a difference between Prinergy and XMF, though have been meaning to backtrack that as to tweakability.
This might motivate me...(note for next week... blues skies here.. better make the most of it).

[Farabomb]

Honestly, I like the overprint effect but it makes it a bitch to read.

[David]

Most designers don't build stuff so you can read it, that would be silly.
It just has to look cool.

 

[Slappy]

Got this the other day, sort of related. Clever designer had placed an image inside of a question mark frame, but had left the actual image RGB black, and filled the frame with just 100% Black. I ghetto fixed it, cloned the bottom of the image far enough to fill the frame, instead of trying to determine the rich black in the photo.