My printer guy in Fresno said my black text was "four inks fighting" and it broke my brain
I run a small side hustle doing wedding invites and for 2 years I set all my black text as rich black, meaning I mixed cyan, magenta, yellow, and 100% K like a genius. Last September a press operator in Fresno looked at one of my proofs and asked why my black was "four inks fighting each other." He explained that all those inks stack up and if the registration drifts even a little, the text gets fuzzy edges and looks slightly purple. I switched every piece of small black text to 100% K only and suddenly my type looked razor sharp on every run. My paper bill went down too since I wasn't laying down all that extra ink. Did anyone else get taught rich black as the "right" way and then find out it was only meant for big solid areas?
Did you ever try just setting your blacks as 100% K for body copy and saving the rich black for big bold headers? That is what I do now and it fixed the same fuzzy text problem for me. My old print teacher pushed rich black on everything too, but once I saw how a tiny shift in registration turned small type into a blurry mess, I never went back. Bonus is my ink use dropped and my prints come out way cleaner.