Free Desktop Publishing for Not for Profit

You are a Not for Profit organisation or a Charity and you need some professional work done, such as create a new logo, refurbish an existing logo, create a brochure, something that will be downloaded from your site, or sent to a professional printer (I only handle minor webdesign work).

This is expensive and the work of professional designers, which you may not have the funds to pay.

Check my main website
http://www.affordabledesign.pl
where most of my portfolio is now displayed (this blog is no longer updated as of 12/2010)

Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/#!/cedricsagne

You will need to sign a contract and make a donation to another charity

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

CMYK and RGB colours

What is CMYK?
When you see a colour printed on paper, you're putting a coloured ink on a white surface. If you read your old science books, they'll tell you colours are light frequency, and if you put three primary colours such as blue, cyan and magenta you'll get black.
In fact, brown.

For nice blues and reds, in printing there is usually black involved. A jar of black ink. It's CMYK printing, Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (or Kelvin). You can call it four-colour printing. Unfortunately some colours will not print, especially some very rich blues (nothing to do with music). This is called gamut (as = colours available) and out of gamut colours.



RGB
Now think about it, on a computer screen, a colour is made from black, and you add Red, Green or Blue (RGB) and when you get the three together, then you get white.

CONCLUSION:
It doesn't take a smart person to realize that the way you talk about colours for paper and for screen, you're going to talk two different languages.
There are colour specialists in printing bureaus, people who are diving deep in the PMS.
PMS here does not stand for Pre-Menstrual Syndrome, but for Pantone Matching System. That's what allows you to configure an offset printer or a web printer (which has NOTHING to do with the WWW, it's a printer that prints on continuous paper rolls) and take as little risk as possible and get colours "the way they were intended".

Now that is a bad thing. The human eye can distinguish so many colours and shades (and if you go shopping with your other half you KNOW what I mean) that if you had paint pots and tried to reproduce the same shade, it's fairly evident that you may as well get an unlimited army of monkeys typing and just hope.
On top of that, when you see a colour on your screen there's no way to be sure. There are tools that display an approximate colour on your screen (but calibrating a screen is a work of art), colour swatches that tell you about colours and what they are called, then the guy with the PMS (sorry the joke was irresistible) can do his job.
All this stuff is called Colour Management, and if you know what it means to get washed colours after clothes come out of the washing machine or the wrong shade of green, you know what I mean, and you also understand why colour management is in the disclaimer.

Spot colours:
Sometimes when one colour is really really important, you'll get a spot colour involved.
You know. Like when you paint your living room with a hand mixed paint and you keep some on the side for the day you'll need the exact same shade
Well if your company logo has that one special colour, you'll want a spot colour.
It is also true that these days you get more inks such as orange or dark green (fairly difficult to get a nice dark green or a bright orange sometimes), and this is called 6-colour printing.

Plus of course silver, fluorescent inks, etc that obviously are not mixed with cyan, magenta, yellow at all.

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