Printers or Graphics guys... black output question

[zenmindbeginner]

I'm in the usual rookie moment of freaking out at the black output from a CMYK .pdf on an RGB monitor

I understand that black output is pretty serious business. The document was created in CMYK but bounced back and forth between indesign and photoshop.

What do I need to do to ensure that a document will print correctly and not be rejected by the printer?

I'm sort of in over my head when it comes to black output I suppose...

Help?!?

[zenmindbeginner]

He Zen,

Is there black type?

If there are no pictures (tone) of people, don't worry so much, as everything besides skintone is quite subjective. Skintone always goes red from RGB to CMYK because the cyan ink on a printing press is far weaker than magenta and yellow (this is why correct hilites are 5C 2M 2Y and shadows are 80C 70M 70Y) so RGB are all equal, but they make on the fly C M Y plates equal in colors, so the cyan ink cannot possibly cover the amount of magenta...

LOL,

Send me the PDF and I"ll give it a quick look.

So much f**king intelligence there. I am totally in your debt for that!

[polara]

Rodip's right. All I'd add is that most commercial printers will tell you not to exceed about 250% ink, so if your solid blacks are, say, 100K, 40M, 40C, 20Y you'll be in fine shape. Just enough of the other colors to make sure it's REALLY black but risk of ink too heavy on the paper. Is this the black in a photo or in a graphic element? If it's a photo you can use the eyedropper in Photoshop to sample your darks and highlights and tweak the histogram til it's right but yeah, as long as the skin tones are good and you don't blow out the highlights like Rodip said you're good to go.