RGB verses CMYK Colours
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To colour print your digital files, you need to provide the graphics and image in the correct colour mode. Many software programmes will allow you to work with RGB colour or CMYK colour mode. RGB colours or Red-Green-Blue colours are familiarly known as the primary colours of the light. This colour combination is represented on your t.v. or computer monitors. The digital cameras and scanners also make pictures using Red-Green-Blue colour combinations. Red-Green-Blue colour mode ought to be in use when taking photos that need to be seen on a 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 spectrum able to be seen. Light is sent by the monitor, and the printing ink recognizes only a particular wavelength of colours. The three primary colours are combined to produce white colour. If the three primary colours are missing, the light will appear as black. By combining various intensities of RGB colours, each combination produces various colours. A monitor of a television or a computer is made of small units called pixels. Every pixel contains three units of light, and each unit represents red, green and blue.
You cannot see the individual pixels with the naked eye because they are so tiny. Each pixel is made by applying proper values of RGB, as without the proper values of the colour units, you cannot see anything on the screen. The values of RGB colours are calculated mainly by three methods. The first method is to set them using 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 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 are using 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 means there is a wide diversity between the resulting print and the monitor display. Additive colour projects the light from the monitor, and if more light is projected from a particular 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 are subtracting the non-essential wavelengths from the light that falls on the ink. The remaining light will return to our eyes, resulting in the impression of other colours. If you are mixing several 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. You will have to add some black ink to get the best results for printing true black. To receive a stronger tone of any colour, you must add black in CMYK mode.
And what about the lighter shade of colours? Because white ink cannot be created using CMYK colours, you need to work under the hypothesis that you are printing the colours on a white paper. Since small 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 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%. But when the total percentage reaches 400%, the ink will take more time to dry. Therefore, the total percentage of ink shouldn’t be more than 300% in CMYK mode.
Both the colour modes have limitations. Images resulting using RGB mode cannot be converted smoothly into CMYK mode because of the brightness of the 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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