Getting correct color clicks from your bizhub or any color printer

Have you ever printed black and white and color pages from word and all of them come out as color clicks?  Here is a simple way to handle this problem.

We occasionally receive calls from our customers that they have run a multiple page document from MS Word and are expecting it to click color pages as color, and black and white pages as black and white.

First off, many softwares deal with black and white as what is called “CMYK Black”.  This is mixing all four colors to make black.  When the copier receives this information from your computer program it then “clicks” you for a color page even though it looks black and white on your screen.  This also applies to Adobe Indesign and many other programs.  For example if you add a drop shadow to black and white text in Indesign it converts the page to CMYK Black.

Realize that there is nothing wrong with the machine.  It will correctly “click” what it is sent to it.  If your program sends CMYK Black you will be “clicked” for color as it has used all 4 colors to make your print.

How to solve this problem:

1.  Export your multi-page mixed document to a PDF Document from MS Word.  Usually this is a “print to pdf” function in word.
2.  Open your exported PDF in Acrobat Pro.  You can get your free trail by clicking here.
3.  Go to tools > production print > convert colors
4.  Select the page range which you would like to convert to black and white.  Located at the bottom of the screen.
5.  Then towards the upper right side select under  “Conversion Attributes” select the drop down “conversion profile” and select one of the gray gamma selections ( gray gamma 2).
6. Click OK.  It let you know that the conversion cannot be undone.  Tell it to proceed.
7. You can now print your document from Acrobat and it will click correctly on your bizhub or desktop color printer.