RGB verses CMYK Colours
For the colour printing of your digital files, you have to supply the graphics and image in the right colour mode. Many software programs will let you to work with RGB colour 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 television 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 have to be seen on the monitor, 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 monitor, and the ink recognises only a certain wavelength of colours. The three primary colours are combined together to produce white. If the three primary colours are missing, then the light will show as black. By combining a variety of intensities of RGB colours, each combination results in differing colours. The monitor of a television or a computer is made up of small units called pixels. Each pixel contains three units of light, and each unit represents red, green and blue.
You can not see the individual pixels with the naked eye as they are so tiny. 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 monitor. 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 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 are using subtractive colours to result in 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 colour. This difference means there is a wide diversity between the resulting print and the onscreen display. Additive colour projects light from the monitor, and if more light is projected from a specific 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 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, giving the impression of other colours. If you are combining a number of colours, then more light will be absorbed by the ink and a lesser amount of light will get reflected to your eyes, and that results in darker colour. Black ink produced by the CMYK colours isn’t the deep black. You need to add some black ink to get the best results for receiving true black. To get a stronger shade of any colour, you must add black in CMYK mode.
And what about the lighter shade of colours? As white ink cannot be created using CMYK colours, you have to work under the hypothesis that you are printing colour onto white paper. Because small dots of ink are used to print images you have to use the inks in lower percentage to produce lighter shades so that more white colour is visible among the dots. The values of CMYK colours are calculated with the help of 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, when the total percentage reaches 400%, the ink will take more time to dry. Hence, the total percentage of the ink should not be more than 300% in CMYK mode.
Both the colour modes have limitations. Images resulting using RGB mode can’t be converted smoothly into CMYK mode because of the brightness of the RGB colours. Similarly, CMYK colours can not be converted into 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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