CMYK versus RGB

What is CMYK? CMYK is a colour model that synthesizes all colors as a combination of 4 base colors. These 4 colours are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

Therefore CMYK stands for Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black. CMYK is also known as a Subtractive process. The subtractive color process is based on light reflected from a surface and passed through pigments or dyes that absorb certain wavelengths, allowing others to be reflected. White is produced by simply using white paper and leaving it blank. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents. Because such printing uses inks of these four basic colors, it is also called four-color printing. Offset printing is widely used for desktop publishing. Below diagram depicts CMYK.

In contrast, display devices generally use a different color model called RGB, which stands for Red-Green-Blue. Unlike CMYK, RGB is an additive color system. This simply means that colour is added to a black background. Black is the absence of light and therefore the absence of colour. Interesting, white colour is achieved by adding the three primary colours (Red-Green-Blue) together in equal proportion. Screen based rendering thus uses RGB instead of CMYK.

One of the most difficult aspects of desktop publishing in colour is colour matching -- properly converting the RGB colours into CMYK colours so that what gets printed looks the same as what appears on the monitor.

Well, these are the basics for color reproduction. It is by no means exhaustive. Hope that the article is useful.

Additional resources:

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