Color Science, Color Theory, Color Calibration; much of it in our industry is still a psuedo-science — filled with much speculation, and, to tell you the truth, professional confusion. In my production experience, even talking with members of the INTERNATIONAL COLOR CONSORTIUM can give you more questions than answers. So here are the basics, and further resources to get you started on the world of color for print and web, passed onto me by Art Director’s stressed out long before me.
Color we see vs. color we produce
The human eye can see 7,000,000 colors, or so the experts estimate. RGB, the reflection of Red Green and Blue light, shows only about 13% of what the human eye can see. CMYK, only 7%. In that estimation alone you can see why color is a significant frustration for an artist — with our current technology, we cannot reproduce the human eye.
Ever wondered why you make a beautiful, brilliant blue in photoshop, swing your color to CMYK from RGB, and it turns into a matte, dull blue? That’s because the color you created cannot be reproduced in CMYK… it’s too far out of the gamut.
Gamut?
Gamut, as described by Google via RockPrint Dictionary is:
Every color combination that is possible to produce with a given set of colorants on a given device or system.
So when we think of a color space, we think of a 3D glob or a 2D drawing that shows how much color we can produce within our device limitations. Adobe RGB has a ‘wider gamut’, so it can produce a larger percentage of colors compared to the human eye. sRGB has a slightly smaller gamut than Adobe RGB, so it produces a smaller amount of color compared to the human eye than Adobe RGB (however, it’s been largely adopted as the preferred color space in Monitors and certain RGB devices, so you will find that many professionals recommend sRGB if that is your target output — I have a tendency to prefer Adobe RGB, but I have varied outputs, as I’ll explain below). CMYK is, again, much smaller a color space compared to the various forms of RGB — print design is therefore an even more extreme frustration in color consistency to any designer. That’s the last time I write extreme, I promise.
So from the beginning of your design, to the ultimate end result, whether it’s a web application or a a hi-resolution screenprinted poster, your job is to control the translation of your color from one device to the next… let’s talk about each color technology specifically.
CMYK or CMYKcmOG or CMYKcm or Pantone…
The print world seems largely the most technical and most confusing in design — what you see on your monitor is NOT what you get on your printer, or your professional proofs, etc. However you calibrate your monitor (as we’ll discuss more later), you’re essentially translating an RGB screen to a CMYK print.
Cyan (pronounced ‘Sighanne’ not like the native american tribe), Magenta, Yellow, and Black come together in a series of dots to make the impression various colors when someone looks at a CMYK print. In theory, CMY should produce Black for you, but impurities of man made inks (namely, the materials we use to create them) required the early producers of color to a make a ‘Black’ ink. The rumor is, the acronym ‘K’ was used because ‘B’ was always mistaken as ‘Blue’ (and you’ll hear more than one comment in your lifetime from a client, client’s assistant, or young designer that your color could use more Blue… when they probably mean it could use a bit more Cyan) — rumors aside, most of us in the industry accept the term that K stands for the ‘Key Plate’, the area of detail an artist created, commonly designed in black.
As Digital Print has moved ahead in our industry as a strong leader for print methods, CMYK has grown into the more advanced CMYKcm (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan, Light Magenta), allowing for more accurate printing in areas such as skin tone, and CMYKcmOG (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan, Light Magenta, Orange, and Green), allowing for ‘Hi-Fi’ Printing, with an impressive color output offering a huge gamut of color compared to the original CMYK.
Wikipedia has an interesting, albeit brief discussion of the CMYK color model worth reading.
What’s coming next?
We’ll talk briefly about RGB, LAB, ICC profiles, mix them all together in Color Calibration, Color Theory, Color Psychology, Controlling color in your daily applications… and the growing frustration of Color in the Design industry.