CMYK is the king of color in the printing world. Four-color printing, (a.k.a. full-color printing) uses the CMYK process, which consists of four ink shades: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (sometimes called Key). 48HourPrint.com uses CMYK colors to create vivid color reproductions that will make your marketing pieces pop! Enjoy these interesting facts about four-color printing.
CMYK inks are semi-transparent, so instead of mixing these colors, they are layered together in the printing process. The outcome is bright, accurate, solid shades.
Any color, when lowered to the end of the spectrum, can create black, but this wastes ink. Including black in CMYK saves money and ink. Separating black from cyan, magenta and yellow in four-color printing optimizes the remaining colors and produces better results.
Four-color printing is often called a “subtractive” model because adding colored inks to white paper “subtracts” brightness from the paper.
To create thousands of colors, four-color printing uses half-toning. Printing tiny dots of the four colors in varying amounts in a small pattern tricks the eye into seeing a particular color. Without half-toning, four-color printing would produce only six solid shades: cyan, magenta, yellow, green, purple and red.
A computer monitor displays RGB (red, green and blue) colors, whereas printing presses use the CMYK process. To avoid a color shift in printing, design your file in CMYK or convert your RGB file to CMYK before submitting it.