Back to Dye Printing Tricks & Tips
In the printing world "Four Color" is FULL color. The four colors are the primary colors used to "mix" thousands of other colors in the spectrum. Imagine your old box of crayons: Red, Yellow, Blue, Black and White. With the first three you could mix Orange, Green and Purple. By adding Black you could darken any shade. By adding White you could lighten any tint. By mixing a primary (like Red) with its complimentary secondary (Green) you could get a Brown.
Just as you could mix your primary colors in grade school, printers mix their primary inks.
They are known as the process colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK).
In printing, instead of crayons, we have Cyan (a light blue) Magenta (a
cool red) Yellow, and Black inks. Where's White? It's the paper color. So
we use these four colors (plus the paper) to visually "mix" all
the colors in a full color photo or graphic. CMYK is the shorthand for these
four "process colors." If we mix all the inks together you head
darker and darker. Less ink coverage allows the "white" to show
through from the paper. This is where we get light pastel tints.
Here you see a photo of one of our professional printers getting into his job.
A close-up of a printed halftone photograph would show a series of dots in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
These four process colors are used to create a full color rendering.
Go back to your box of crayons; all the special colors--including silver,
bronze, and that cool gold one--can be considered "spot colors."
These colors we create by premixing a particular supply of ink; green, pink,
tan, brown, teal, adobe, maize, metallics, pastels, etc. If you absolutely
positively have to have a certain color, you pick one of these "spot"
colors from the Pantone color chips.
If you need a certain chartreuse we can direct you to a Pantone color chip. These are good for printing one, two or even three colors. Once you get to four specific Pantone colors you want, you might want to get a quote on going with the cheaper, process equivalents (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black). If you have to have a particular color, not easily recreated with the process inks, and you need a full color photograph too, you might be heading into 5- and 6-color land. Be prepared for higher costs.
The computer screen does about the same thing with its primary colors that printers do with their primary inks. Look at your screen so close that your office mate will think you fell asleep on it. See those little dots of Red, Blue and Green? They visually mix to create the various colors on your document (and this page for example) this is RGB (Red Green Blue). Computer-based web graphics are done in a mode that uses light--not pigment (like crayons or ink)--to mix colors. These are totally different mix ratios. For information on that whole set of science click here. You have to transform any RGB based colors to standard inks in order to print the job on paper. PhotoShop is an excellent tool for this important duty.
