Back to Dye Printing Tricks & Tips
Color Mode |
Use |
Printable? |
Web Viewable? |
Range |
| Grayscale | One-color work | Yes | Not unconverted | Black & tints of Black (grays) |
| CMYK | Full-color | Yes | Not unconverted | Thousands |
| RGB | Screen Viewing | Not untranslated | Yes | Millions |
| Duotone | Two-color work | Yes | Not unconverted | Two colors plus tints. |
| Indexed Color | Creating GIFs | Not untranslated | Yes | Limited Palette |
CMYK stands for the basic four colors in printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Remember back to kindergarten? Red plus yellow equals orange? Okay, with Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow, and Black (called K) printers can mix a wide variety of colors. But not ALL colors. For more information on how those colors work click here.
For special shades you deal with Pantone inks (also known as PMS colors--Pantone Matching System). With this variety of premixed colors you can print specific spot colors. That way you can print a one-color job in a dark blue, a bright green, or a totally illegible canary yellow. You can specify several PMS colors in various desktop applications. But remember, each color costs you. If after two or three spot inks, consider going to full color printing. You can of course print full color PLUS a spot color or two, or twelve. We'd love to print it for you since our children need college funds too!
So we've discussed CMYK--what's the RGB stand for? Red Green and Blue. The primary colors for mixing LIGHT. Do you see the problem? Mixing light is not like mixing ink. RGB items are for viewing on the screen. They are designed for web graphics. They do not print. Why? Because Red plus Green light equals Yellow. Red plus Green ink equals brown. Green plus Blue light gets you a nice sky blue. Green plus Blue ink gets you dark teal. Red plus Blue light gets you hot pink. Red plus Blue ink gives you dark purple. Add all of the inks together and you get really dark black. Add all the colors of light together and you get WHITE.
Imagine three little flashlights: Red Green and Blue. Turn them all on and the colors will create a white spotlight. Depending on which two of the three are switched on you can create millions of colors. Turn them all off, and well, you get black...
Look at your monitor. No, up close. Really close. Put a tiny drop of water on the screen and you'll see little tiny pixels. 72 of them per inch. All of them are red, green, or blue. Depending on which ones are "lit" your screen is generating millions of colors. And since your computer only does what you tell it to do, if you specify RGB colors, we'll be stuck with RGB film. is this bad? Uh, huh!
Imagine your graphics set up in RGB and we run it as a spot 3-color job....Can't? Well look at what you would draw and how it would come out below.
OUCH! Black goes white, white goes black. Pure
reds, blues, and greens stay in the family, but everything else heads towards
dirty brown.
Yes, we can convert an RGB format to CMYK. The colors will shift somewhat. You will have to run the job as full color, even if your image contains only two shades. I know it's confusing. That's why you should figure out your target and go from there. If you want your logo to print set it up as a CMYK job or spot color. If you also need it to be on the web make a copy of it and convert it to the proper color mode. We'd be happy to do that for you! You can do it easily with PhotoShop from Adobe.com.