RGB verses CMYK Colours
For the colour printing of your digital files, you need to provide the graphics and image in the right colour mode. Many software programmes let you to work on RGB colour mode or CMYK colour mode. RGB colours or Red-Green-Blue colours are known as the primary colours of the light. This colour combination is represented on your t.v. or computer monitors. Digital cameras and scanners also create images using Red-Green-Blue colour combinations. Red-Green-Blue colour mode ought to be in use while taking photos that are to be viewed on a monitor, emails or CD.
All the colours of the light spectrum are formed from 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. All three primary colours are combined together to produce white. If the three primary colours are absent, then the light will appear as black. By combining various intensities of RGB colours, each combination results in differing colours. The monitor of a television or a computer consists of small units known as pixels. Each pixel contains three units of light, and each unit represents red, green and blue.
You can not see individual pixels with the naked eye because they are too small. Each pixel is developed by applying correct values of RGB, as without the proper values of the colour units, you cannot see any image displayed 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 best method of the three.
The second method is by using 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 are referring 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 large diversity between the resulting print and the screen display. Additive colour throws the light from the monitor, and if more light is projected from a particular pixel, it will be closer to the pure light. In the case of 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 take away 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 a variety of 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 the eye, which results in darker colour. Black ink produced by the CMYK colours isn’t a deep black. So you need to add black ink to produce the best results for printing true black. If you would like to have a darker shade of any colour, you need to add black in CMYK mode.
And what about the lighter shade of colours? Because white ink cannot be created using CMYK colours, you have to work under the hypothesis that you are printing colour on a white paper. Because tiny dots of inks are used to print images the inks are used in lower percentage to produce lighter shades so that more white is visible 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 if the total percentage reaches 400%, the ink takes more time to dry. Hence, the total percentage of the ink should not be more than 300% in CMYK mode.
Both of the colour modes have their own limitations. The images resulting using RGB mode can’t be converted smoothly into CMYK mode due to 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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