Why cmyk and not cmyk

But to fully optimize your design, you need to understand the mechanisms behind each. Use the RGB color mode if your design is supposed to be displayed on any kind of screen.

A light source within a device creates any color you need by mixing red, green and blue and varying their intensity. This is known as additive mixing: all colors begin as black darkness and then red, green and blue light is added on top of each other to brighten it and create the perfect pigment.

When red, green and blue light is mixed together at equal intensity, they create pure white. Designers can control aspects like saturation, vibrancy and shading by modifying any of the three source colors. If the end destination of your design project is a digital screen, use the RGB color mode. This would go for anything that involves computers, smartphones, tablets, TVs, cameras, etc. PNGs support transparency and are better for graphics that need to be superimposed over others.

Consider this file type for interface elements like buttons, icons or banners. These formats are not compatible with most software, not to mention they can be unnecessarily large in terms of data. A printing machine creates images by combining CMYK colors to varying degrees with physical ink.

This is known as subtractive mixing. All colors start as blank white, and each layer of ink reduces the initial brightness to create the preferred color. When all colors are mixed together, they create pure black. Use CMYK for any project design that will be physically printed, not viewed on a screen. If you need to recreate your design with ink or paint, the CMYK color mode will give you more accurate results. With these overlapping colors we can now begin subtracting lightwaves to create specific colors, for instance to create pure Red you would mix Yellow with Magenta.

Lucky for most of us, printing RGB files on a CMYK printer is not going to drastically misrepresent the colors of the image, but sometimes the color mismatch can be noticeable. The most common mismatch is usually with Blues looking more Purple. You can tell that the Reds and Yellows look very similar, but the Greens, Blues, and Purples look noticeably different.

So next time you are designing something for color print, make sure you check out how it looks in CMYK before you send it off to your local printer. Mixing some of these colors produces the secondary colors — cyan, magenta, and yellow. Mixing them all produces white. Primary colors however, are arbitrary. There are several competing color models , and the theory behind color is quite complicated. However, partly for historical reasons, and mostly because most electronic screens are dark, we use RGB color models for most light producing imaging devices such as monitors and projectors.

Combining red, green and blue light produces lighter colors, offering a good contrast to dark screens. While there are a select number of rare printers that use RGB, there are a multitude of practical reasons CMYK printing will be the dominant model for a long time.

This is where the background starts of white like a sheet of paper in a printer and as more colour is added it gets darker until it turns black. Technically if you added cyan, magenta and yellow together in equal and large amounts, it would create black. This is because CMYK is easier to standardise, thanks to the spectrum of colours available. That means we can keep all of your print products looking perfectly consistent throughout the print run. There are so many minute variations possible in RGB that it is nigh on impossible to guarantee consistency of colours across a print run, or even between different print runs.

This is why commercial printers use CMYK most frequently, as it helps to ensure consistency of colour across print runs and also across machines. This is because conversion from RGB to CMYK can result in colour variations, as the colours are created differently remember: additive versus subtractive.