RGB verses CMYK Colours
For the colour printing of your digital files, you need to provide the graphics and images in the optimum colour mode. Many software programs will let you to work with RGB colour or CMYK colour. RGB colours or Red-Green-Blue colours are known as the primary colours of the light. This combination is represented on your tv or computer monitors. The digital cameras and scanners also produce images with Red-Green-Blue colour combinations. Red-Green-Blue colour mode ought to be used when taking photos that are to be seen on a monitor, or by emails or CD.
All colours of the light spectrum are created from the primary colours, but monitors can display only limited colour range from the spectrum able to be seen. Light is sent by the monitors, and the printing ink recognizes only a certain wavelength of colours. The three primary colours are combined together to produce white colour. If the three primary colours are absent, then the light will show as black. By combining a variety of intensities of RGB colours, each combination produces differing colours. The monitor of a tv or a computer is made of small units called pixels. Each pixel contains three units of light, and each unit represents red, green and blue.
You cannot see individual pixels with the naked eye because they are so tiny. But every pixel is created by the application of correct values of RGB, and without the proper values of the colour units, you cannot see anything displayed on the screen. The values of RGB colours are calculated mainly by three methods. The first method is to set them with the help of different numeric values. The numeric values used for this purpose are the values from 0 to 255, and this is the superior method of the three.
The second method is by using hexadecimal notations. This method is mainly used for HTML and other languages of the computer. These notations follow a logical pattern. The hexadecimal notation consists of six characters, with these characters being divided into three. The first pair represents the red, the second pair green and the third pair as blue. Each pair is represented by a hexadecimal number (0-9) and the letters (A-F). The third method is the percentage in which a certain percentage represents each colour. The program translates these percentages into suitable values ranges from 0-255.
CMYK colours or Cyan-Magenta-Yellow colours are subtractive colours, whereas RGB colours are additive colours. Additive colours refer to light, whereas subtractive colours refer to inks, paint or pigment. CMYK mode is used for printing as all kind of printers use subtractive colours to result in differing colours. When three additive colours are combined, the combination will produce white colour. But when three subtractive colours are combined, the combination produces black. This difference develops a wide diversity between the print and the screen display. Additive colour projects the light from the monitor, and if more light is projected from an independent pixel, it will be closer to the pure light. Regarding printer inks, they will absorb light and reflects only the wavelengths of light that is linked with the colour of the ink.
The inks of the printer take away the non-essential wavelengths from the light that falls on the ink. The remaining light will return to the eye, providing the impression of other colours. If you are combining even more colours, then more light will be absorbed by the ink and a lesser amount of light will get reflected to your eyes, which results in darker colour. Black ink produced by the CMYK colours is not the strong black. You will have to add black ink to get the best results for printing true black. To get a darker variety of a colour, you have to add black in CMYK mode.
And how about the lighter shade of colours? As white ink cannot be created using CMYK colours, you need to work under the hypothesis that you are printing colour onto white paper. As tiny dots of inks are used to print images you have to use the inks in lower percentage to produce lighter shades so that more white is seen among the dots. The values of CMYK colours are calculated using four different percentages. The values of each percentage should be between 0 and 100 so that the total percentage of the ink values can be up to 400%. But if the total percentage reaches 400%, the ink will take more time to dry. Hence, the total percentage of ink should not be more than 300% in CMYK mode.
Both of the colour modes have their own limitations. Images developed using RGB mode cannot be converted smoothly into CMYK mode due to the brightness of RGB colours. Similarly, CMYK colours can’t be converted to RGB mode because the sharp look of RGB colours is missing in CMYK mode online. This is the reason why RGB colours are used in monitors and CMYK colours are used in printers.
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