RGB and CMYK Color Guide
In order to ensure that your print material looks exactly as you have designed it, it is important that you understand the nuances between the two common color standards, RGB and CMYK, and take all necessary steps when designing your logo, images, or pictures.
RGB
Scanners and digital cameras create and store images using a combination of just three colors: Red, Green and Blue (called "RGB" or additive colors). These colors are used by all television and computers monitors to display images.
CMYK
Printing presses, on the other hand, print full color pictures using a different set of colors, the primary colors of pigment ink: Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black/Koal (called "CMYK" or subtractive colors). This is "4-color process" or "full-color printing" used by the global printing industry.
When building your logo, image or design, you need to make sure you are in CMYK mode.
You can use any of the following software to convert to the CMYK color space:
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe InDesign
- Adobe PageMaker
- Adobe Photoshop
- Corel Draw
- MS Publisher
- Quark Xpress
- Xara Xone
All RGB files must be translated to CMYK in order to print properly on a printing press.
If you don't have any of these software, all images, logos, and designs will automatically be converted to CMYK. Colors will be altered from your original design.
RGB has a much larger color space. As a result, there will always be a loss of color tones when converting from RGB to CMYK. Even though monitors always use RGB to display colors, the colors you see on your monitor will more closely match the final printed piece if you are viewing them in the CMYK color space.
Optimalprint.com will simply do a standard conversion to CMYK, in order to guarantee that all images are in CMYK format before they are printed.
Note that Optimalprint.com is not responsible for less-than-perfect results if you furnish your images in RGB.