RGB verses CMYK Colours
To colour print your digital files, you must provide the graphics and images in the correct colour mode. Many software programmes let you to work with RGB colour mode or CMYK colour. RGB colours or Red-Green-Blue colours are familiarly known as the primary colours of the light. This colour combination can be seen on your tv or computer monitors. The digital cameras and scanners also produce images using Red-Green-Blue colour combinations. Red-Green-Blue colour mode should be used while taking photos that are to be viewed on the monitor, or by emails or CD.
All the colours of the light spectrum are formed from the primary colours, but monitors can display only a limited colour range from the visible spectrum. Light is emitted from the monitors, and the printing ink recognises only a certain wavelength of colours. All three primary colours are combined together to produce white colour. If all three primary colours are absent, then the light will appear as black. By combining a variety of intensities of RGB colours, each mixture produces different colours. A monitor of a television 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.
We can not actually see the individual pixels with the naked eye as they are so small. But each pixel is developed by the application of proper values of RGB, and without the proper values of the colour units, you will not see anything 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 easiest method of the three.
The second method is the use of hexadecimal notations. This method is mainly used for HTML and other languages of the computer. These notations follow a logical pattern. The hexadecimal notation uses 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 programme 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 produce different 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 resulting print and the screen display. Additive colour projects light from the monitor, and if more light is projected from an independent pixel, it will be closer to the pure light. In the case of printer inks, they absorb light and reflects only the wavelengths of light that is associated with the colour of the ink.
The inks of the printer are subtracting the non-essential wavelengths from the light that falls on the ink. The remaining light will return to the eye, providing the impression of a variety of colours. If you are mixing 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 isn’t a deep black. So you need to add some black ink to produce the best results for receiving true black. To get a darker shade of a colour, you have to add black in CMYK mode.
What about the lighter shade of colours? As white ink cannot be created using CMYK colours, you need to work with the hypothesis that you are printing the colours on a white paper. Because tiny dots of ink are used to print images the inks are used in a lower percentage to produce lighter shades so that more white colour 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%. However, if the total percentage reaches 400%, the ink takes more time to dry. Hence, the total percentage of the ink shouldn’t be more than 300% in CMYK mode.
Both colour modes have their own limitations. Images resulting using RGB mode cannot be converted smoothly into CMYK mode because of the brightness of the RGB colours. Similarly, CMYK colours cannot be converted to RGB mode as 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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