What is Your Color Space? Part 3, CMYK.

Professional printers use CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) to print full-color text, graphics, and photos on just about anything. These colors are called Process Colors and, when printed, the inks are laid down light to dark. CMYK is known as a Subtractive Color Model because every time one ink overlays another the color gets darker and it subtracts from the reflectance of the substrate.

So, how does CMYK work?

Let’s take a picture of an old red barn surrounded by green grass, against a blue sky. First, that picture would be Color Separated into its CMYK components. Since this is a photo, the printer would use a Halftone Screen. This screen breaks the image up into little dots and controls the amount of ink being laid down in any particular area of the photo. In the separation (a negative image), the darker areas contain small dots, allowing more ink to be transferred to the paper by the plate. In lighter areas these dots are large, so the plate picks up and carries less ink to the paper, resulting in lighter printed tones.

Now we have our four plates and the press is inked up. We’re ready to print thousands of copies of our barn landscape. How do we get those brilliant reds, greens and blues? That’s easy (at least in theory). CMY are secondary colors in the RGB color model we spoke about last time. By mixing any two secondary colors you get one of the RGB primaries.

For the barn, the red will be a mixture of magenta and yellow. The green grass is a mixture of the yellow and blue and the blue sky is a mixture of magenta and cyan. (See photo)

Final Question: Why do we need a black (K) plate in four-color printing?
Answer: In theory, the secondary colors CMY, when printed at 100% saturation, should add up to a solid black. But that’s only in theory. The fact is that without the black added we end up with a dark muddy brown. This is not a problem with the theory, but instead it is the imperfections of the inks. Adding black is the only way a printer can get richness and depth in a printed piece.

What is Your Color Space? Part 2.
RGB

The RGB color space is the most common way we see color. It is not only the way color is mixed for televisions, computer monitors and digital cameras, but it is also the way our eyes view and our brains interpret the world around us.

This color space, called an Additive Color model, consist of the three primary colors red, green, and blue. An additive color model is one that involves light and uses overlapping primary colors to create all other colors by combining them in different intensities and ratios.

There are two major factors that make the RGB color model counterintuitive for printers, painters and designers who have to mix dyes, inks, and paints. The first is the difference in the primaries themselves. As we learned in grade school art class, our primaries in paint are Red, YELLOW, and blue, with green being achieved only by blending the yellow and blue primaries. Now being confronted with green as a primary, our color palette is thrown way off. How do we make yellow, a color we were taught was a primary?

That brings us to the second factor. Unlike paint, which gets darker as you add primaries, light does the opposite. Adding primary red and primary green gives us a bright yellow, which in light is a secondary color. And if we were to add primary blue to that mix, the area where all three overlap would be white (see photo).

Hint: An easy way to remember the difference between an additive and subtractive color model is to ask yourself, "how do I get to no color?" Light requires all primaries to be "added" together to get white, while pigment requires all color to be "subtracted" to reach white or the base color of the substrate.

Next:
CMYK

What Color is Your Space?
Part 1.

RGB vs. CMYK
Understanding color in graphic arts can be confusing, even to experienced designers, printers, and photographers.

That is, in part, because no two people, computers or output devices “see” exactly the same thing, making color models hard to standardize. For instance, the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color space accommodates many different models including sRGB, Adobe RGB 1998, and Adobe Wide Gamut RGB, just to name a few. All have their places in representing color on computer screens, cameras, television sets, projectors and photographic prints. But RGB can’t do everything.

That’s why, in the world of commercial printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) is king. Known as four-color printing, printers use these color pigments to create printed text, graphics, and photos on almost anything. And although Process Colors are pretty much the same everywhere, every combination of computer, press and substrate can create unpredictable and inconsistent color without a Color Profile.

Next Time:
What is Your Color Space?
Part 2
RGB