The world is a wonderful world of color! In today’s marketplace, color is preferred over black and white for marketing pieces. Color marketing materials are eye catching, fun, and stand out from competitive marketing. In fact, our society is so accustomed to color marketing that plain old black and white just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Technology has changed to allow for more efficient and cost effective color printing. Although offset is still widely used, digital color printing is becoming more popular for its cost effectiveness and rich color reproduction.
During our twenty years in the printing business we have seen it all, and we often get questions about color reproduction. A few issues that often come up:
- Why doesn’t the printed piece look exactly like it does on my screen?
- Why doesn’t the printed color look like the color on my website?
- Why does the printed material look different than the last time I printed it?
Most of these questions can be answered with a quick explanation of RGB vs. CMYK
RGB
RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. RGB configures the color on computer monitors and television screens. Think back to grade school when you would mix your primary colors to make a new color, like red and blue make purple. RGB mixes these three colors to make up all that you see on your screen. Sometimes a color will appear on your screen differently than it prints because print is done in CMYK.
CMYK
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. CMYK works just like RGB in that it uses a mixture of those four colors to produce what we print. These four colors, when printed correctly, form all of the colors that the human eye can see. All full color printing, from daily newspapers to full color brochures, is done by printing only the four CYMK colors. Because these colors differ from RGB the printed image can be slightly different than what you see on your screen.
RGB vs. CMYK
Color Separations
CMYK is used for both digital and offset printing. When printing offset, however, you need to be sure you can take the CMYK one step further by allowing for color separations. Color separations allow for an image to be separated into the four color “pieces” that make up the individual CYMK colors like in the train example below. The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black are not simply the same image in different colors but instead they are actually separated into a series of “dots”. Each color is individually worthless and omitting one will obscure the image. You need all four to duplicate the original correctly. They must also be printed precisely to capture the shades of color (think grey vs. black). If any are printed slightly off, or out of registration, color variations will occur.
Example of Color Separations
Hexadecimal color
Hexadecimal color is not used for print, but often we have clients who want to print and match a color that is used on their website. Hexadecimal color is the color code used for HTML websites. It is typically a series of numbers such as 2E0854 for indigo. This color code is used strictly for websites. It is then displayed on the screen through RGB and would have to be converted into CYMK to print.
As a designer, it is important that you know the differences between RGB and CMYK. When you place an image or photo in your project, that photo must be in a CMYK format (not RGB), and your project must be saved in a software format that allows for CMYK color separation for offset printing.
Other Factors
We may know the exact combination of colors needed to print your job, but a few other factors can affect your end result.
- All computer screen displays need to be calibrated. What we see on our screen may be different from what our customer sees on their screen depending on whether or not the screens have been calibrated.
- Additionally, digital copiers also need to be calibrated regularly to ensure the highest possible color match.
- If a digital copier is running low on toner the color might not exactly match the same job if it was printed with a brand new toner cartridge.
- When mixing custom color for an offset press, human error can be a factor.
- Beware of color traps such as plain black and rich black. Black only looks one color on your RGB monitor but can print differently depending on if your art is designed with plain black or rich black.
- Every machine is different. If you printed brochures with one printer then changed to another printer, the same art work may look a little different. We experienced this when we upgraded to a new digital copier, the color was slightly off and adjustments needed to be made.
As you can tell color matching can be challenging. Knowing the differences between the RGB, CMYK, and Color Separations can alleviate a lot of the difficulty involved with designing art for print. However, these examples should be an indication that an absolute exact color match is vulnerable to many factors. Although we can get it very close, color is never an exact science and variations will occur.
Amanda Moore
