Graphics for Business Professionals

CMYK stands for “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black”, and CMYK color – sometimes referred to as “4-color process” or “process” color – is generally used to produce full-color graphic materials and photographs on a “4-color” printing press. The “4” refers to the number of inks used (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and “process” refers to a special printing technique that recreates the full spectrum of visible colors using just these four ink colors.

A graphic or photograph that was printed using CMYK color is made up of thousands of overlapping little dots of ink that the press puts down on paper as the paper passes through it. And – yup, you guessed it – those dots are cyan, magenta, yellow or black in color. The density of these special, different colored dots relative to each other, and the diameter of the dots themselves affect the color being displayed in a particular part of a printed document.

For example, large yellow and cyan dots placed together without any magenta or black dots nearby will make that part of a document look green. Large magenta and cyan dots with no other colored dots nearby will produce a purple or dark blue. Large dots of all four colors placed together will create a very dark, rich black.

The size of the dots in relation to one another will change the hue of the color. For example, using our green example above, if the yellow dots are larger than the cyan dots, the green will look more yellow, or “lime-colored”. If the cyan dots are larger than the yellow dots, the green will look more blue, or “kelly-green”. By adjusting the size of each dot relative to the other, you can recreate any color from yellow to blue, and everything in-between. If you add a black dot nearby, adjusting its size and its density relative to the yellow and blue dots will allow you to make the color darker or lighter. If you add magenta, you’ll start to move the color towards any other number of colors depending again on the number of magenta dots relative to the yellow, blue and black dots, and the size of the magenta dot relative to the yellow, blue and black dots.

In essence, 4-color process printing uses the same color principles you learned as a kid in art class. Just like mixing the primary colors (red, blue and yellow) on an artist’s palette allowed you to create an entire spectrum of other colors to fingerpaint with, “mixing” our 4 “primary” printing ink colors (or adjusting the size and relative density of each of the 4 colored dots throughout a document) allows a printing press to recreate a good portion of the visible color spectrum, and produce a “full-color” image.

When graphic designers create graphics meant to be printed in full-color – like for brochures, catalogues, magazines, and even for full-color logos or business cards – they “set” the colors for the graphics they create as “CMYK”. This way, when a printing press outputs these files as printed materials, it understands the right density and sizes for each of the four colored dots throughout the document in order to achieve the final desired result.

Some computer programs are able to display CMYK format color graphics on your computer monitor, even though you know (if you read my previous post on RGB color) that monitors use RGB (Red, Green Blue) as their color format instead of CMYK. These programs come with a conversion utility that allows the program to tell your monitor what the appropriate RGB color is for the CMYK colors defined in the graphic, and it’ll display the RGB colors instead. Some programs aren’t able to do this. Web browsers and browser based email applications generally aren’t able to display CMYK graphics at all.

What does this mean to me?
So what things do you need to keep in mind about CMYK color that’ll make your life easier?

1) The vast majority of full-color, commercial printing equipment use CMYK format color. As a result, PRINTING PRESSES CAN NOT PRINT ARTWORK SET UP IN RGB COLOR. You must make sure that any artwork you send to a press that is to be printed in full-color is set up in CMYK mode, unless specifically told otherwise by the printer. (I’ll cover other types of full-color printing that use RGB in a later post). If you do not, you may get a phone call from the printer asking you supply new artwork, or you may get a surprise charge on your bill from the printer for converting the RGB artwork to CMYK, and/or you may get a surprise from the printer when you receive your printed materials and the colors are not at all what you expected (see #3 below).

2) You should NOT use CMYK art set up for printing in any document you’re creating to be displayed on an electronic device (PowerPoint slides, web graphics, etc.) If you’ve ever been sent a photo attached to an email that showed up as a little red X that you were unable to view, chances are the photo was in CMYK color, and your monitor or TV couldn’t display it because it was missing the RGB color information it needed to do so. TVs and monitors are as confused by CMYK as much as printing presses are confused by RGB.

3) CMYK COLORS LOOK DIFFERENT PRINTED ON PAPER THEN WHEN VIEWED ON A COMPUTER SCREEN. When an able computer application automatically converts CMYK art you are viewing to its RGB equivalent in order to display it on your monitor, the colors will look different than they do in print. In some cases, the color variation will be very noticeable (blues and purples translate the poorest from CMYK to RGB colors). In other cases it’s not as noticeable. It is imperative that you PRINT out CMYK artwork on a color laser jet or inkjet printer in order to get a better approximation of the colors as they will appear when printed using a CMYK press, and do NOT rely on your computer screen to proof printed color. I should really repeat this as point #4, too, because it is a very important thing to remember. It’s an extremely common mistake people make unknowingly, and then wonder why their printed materials don’t look the way the expect them to look when they get them back from the press.

4) CMYK COLORS ON YOUR PRINTED PIECES WILL VARY PRINT RUN TO PRINT RUN, AND EVEN SOMETIMES WITHIN THE SAME PRINT RUN. Because a press is essentially mixing the four process colors on a piece of paper every time a paper sheet passes beneath the rollers, there will be some color variation press run to press run, just like there are sometimes variations in paint colors when you go to a store at different times and ask to have the same paint color mixed for you. This is usually attributed to how the colors are “balanced”, and how “wet” the rollers are with ink.

A pressman (the person running the press) is responsible for balancing the colors so they are at their optimal balance (so the pieces don’t print too yellow, too blue, too black or too red). If you print your pieces on their own, meaning they are not being simultaneously printed with any other graphic materials, then a pressman will balance the color for your single job alone. If you happen to run your materials on a “gang run”, meaning there are mulitple jobs being printed on large sheets all at once, a pressman is not able to balance the print run for you job specifically, but will instead balance it for the entire load of materials being printed. If your job is printed with different materials each time, the color balances won’t be exactly the same. Gang run presses are extremely popular, in that they are able to offer 4-color process printing very inexpensively since they split the cost of setting up the press amongst all the jobs in each print run, so this is a common occurance. In addition, every pressman is differently skilled in their color balancing abilities. Some are extremely experienced, others are newer to the trade. There is always a human element involved.

There may also be a color variation between the same printed pieces in a single press run. Generally this will happen because of differing amounts of ink being put down on the paper from each ink well. The ink well for each color may be completely full, or running dry at the time your paper passed through the press. If you are having 10,000 pieces printed, and the press started with full ink wells, but during the last 2,000 pieces, one of the wells started to get low in ink, those last 2,000 pieces will get progressively lighter in the ink color that’s getting low, and they’ll look different than the first pieces.

With the increased quality and accuracy of today’s digital presses, these issues usually aren’t as noticable a problem as they have been in the past, but it’s still good to keep them in mind, especially when you are working with smaller commercial printers who may have older equipment.

How to handle CMYK artwork for electronic display
Yes, this paragraph is a repeat of the one from my RGB post, but I’ll say it again: A good designer will ask you how you plan to use the art they are creating for you, and then will deliver you the art in multiple file formats and in multiple color formats that are matched as closely as possible. In this way, they assure that you have the art you need for any application, whether it’s print or electronic so you don’t experience color surprises down the road.

If you have CMYK artwork that you need to display electronically and you don’t have it in RGB format, a knowledgeable designer will be able to convert your CMYK file to RGB for you. Easier than converting from RGB to CMYK, converting from CMYK to RGB can sometimes still require color rebalancing for a “true” color match. The graphic quality of the art you give your designer will also affect the outcome. Higher resolution images generally give better color conversion results.

RGB color stands for “Red Green Blue”, and RGB color is used specifically for electronic display of graphics and images. All colors generated on TVs and computer screens are a result of the combination of red, blue and green light emitted by electronics inside each device.

A TV screen or computer monitor is made up of thousands of little “dots” that sit very close to each other, and together make up your whole screen. Every dot has the capacity to be its own color. Every color displayed in each of these dots is a balance of the intensity of red, blue and green light. When viewed from a distance, these differently colored dots make up a whole picture, and allow for variations of color across the entire screen.

When graphic designers create graphics meant to be displayed electronically — like for web sites or PowerPoint presentations or for CDs or DVDs — they “set” the colors for the graphics they create as “RGB”. This way, the electronic device displaying the graphic knows what balance of red, green and blue light to use for each dot that makes up the graphic.

RGB colors are defined by specific values for the red, blue and green intensities that result in a particular color on your screen. Each unique color of the spectrum has it’s own unique RGB value. The highest a value can be is 255, which means that color is being displayed at its brightest. The lowest a value can be is 0, which means that color is essentially “turned off”. By combining different values for each of the three RGB colors, a computer monitor or TV screen essentially mimics the entire visible spectrum.

For example, a pure, bright red color has the RGB value of 255, 0, 0. That means the red value is set at 255, the green value at 0 and the blue value at 0, or R=255, G=0, B=0. A pure bright green has the RGB value of 0, 255, 0. A pure bright blue is 0, 0, 255. Black is 0, 0, 0, or the absence of light. White is 255, 255, 255, or the inclusion of all light (I’m starting to sound like your high school physics teacher, aren’t I?). The higher the color values for each color, the lighter the shade. The darker the color values for each color, the darker the shade.

What does this mean to me?
Ok you ask, so why should I care? Good question. You need to care for two reasons:

1) The vast majority of machinery used to produce printed materials does not use the RGB color format to define colors. Instead, it uses a value representing a specific ink or combinations of specific inks to approximate the hues of the spectrum. As a result, RGB COLORS DO NOT PRINT OUT AS THE SAME COLOR YOU SEE ON A SCREEN. A screen and a printing device utilize two completely different ways of displaying color, so an RGB color on a screen will look very different next to the same color printed off an inkjet, which had to convert the RGB color to it’s printed equivalent in order to print it out.

2) You can NOT use art set up for printing (ie. NOT set up in RGB color format), on an electronic device. If you’ve ever been sent a photo attached to an email that showed up as a little red X that you were unable to view, chances are the photo was not set up in RGB color, and your monitor or TV couldn’t display it because it was missing the RGB color information it needed to do so.

When you try to print RGB artwork, or convert RGB artwork to the appropriate color format for printing without editing the color, you will get a color shift. That means the closest color used in printing for the RGB color you see on a screen will look different from each other when held up side by side. In some cases it’s very different (blues and purples translate the poorest from RGB to print colors). In other cases it’s not as noticeable.

You must be prepared for this color difference. I’ve had many, many customers come to me in the past who were upset with the work of previous artists or printers because the colors didn’t print right on business cards, or invitations, etc. Inevitably, the customer had pulled artwork off their website, or out of a PowerPoint presentation — artwork that had been created specifically for those mediums by their designer — and used them to create printed materials, and was upset when they did not print out the color they expected.

This was not the designer’s fault: the designer created RGB artwork for use on the Website or inside a PowerPoint presentation, not for print. This was not the printers fault: they printed what the client gave them to print, in this case a file that was originally created in RGB to view on a screen. It was the client’s fault for not understanding what RGB files are, and how and when they should be used.

How to handle RGB artwork for print
A good designer will ask you how you plan to use the art they are creating for you, and then will deliver you the art in multiple file formats and in multiple color formats that are matched as closely as possible. In this way, they assure that you have the art you need for any application, whether it’s print or electronic so you don’t experience color surprises down the road.

If you have RGB artwork that you need printed and you don’t have it in another color format specifically set up for print, a knowledgeable designer will be able to convert your RGB file to print color formats for you. How they accomplish this, and how well they accomplish this is based on the type of file you give them, and on the graphic quality of the file. Art that is still in it’s ‘source’ or ‘editable’ form is easiest to work with, and the higher the resolution quality of the artwork, the better the result. The more complex the art, and the poorer the resolution, the harder it is to achieve a good conversion result. If a file is “flattened” (meaning all the art elements are in a single layer inside the artwork and can’t be “lifted” and moved around independently of one another), the lower the quality of the result.

Ultimately, it’s up to your designer to recommend what they believe is the best way to handle an RGB-to-Print color conversion, but they can’t accomplish this until you understand why you need it done and ask that they do it for you.

There are multiple mediums used to display color in the world today, and as a result, there are multiple ways to represent or define color in the various graphic design applications and production methods used to create graphics for these different mediums.

Understanding how computers and the printing industry use and define color is paramount to helping you understand the limitations of graphic production, so you can make educated choices when choosing a particular process for a particular job and get the best result for your buck. It is also helpful in setting realistic expectations, so you are not disappointed by the outcome.

The most common ways of discussing color in the design world are as RGB, CMYK and Spot colors values. In the next few entries, I will provide an introduction to these three popular color formats and the design/production challenges associated with each.

Having frolicked on both sides of the design fence (as a consumer of graphic design services and as a provider of graphic design services), I know there are plenty of opportunities for misunderstandings that can minimize the efficiency of a vendor/client relationship. Most, if not all, of these situations are avoidable as long as each side takes a little bit of time to get to know the world the other lives in.

Knowledge is our friend. Knowledge leads to better communication. And better communication leads to better end products, better relationships and better results.

The goal of Graphics for Business Professionals is to help business people understand the graphic designer’s world a little better. When a business professional is able to clearly articulate their desires and needs to a graphic designer, and when they have a solid understanding of the design process and the realities of creating graphic materials, they are better able to direct designers to achieve specific results. In return, designers are more likely to deliver exactly what the business professional wants — and quicker, too. It’s a win-win situation.

Each Graphics for Business Professionals entry will discuss a particular design topic and discuss the fundamentals, with special emphasis on those issues most relevant to the business professional. Topics will range from specifics (What is RGB color, for example) to broader discussions (What is good design, anyway?).

Discussion on these topics is highly encouraged. While I may be somewhat wizened in the ways of graphics, my knowledge is limited to my personal experience, and for every topic I discuss, there are two others that people can teach me more about.

I also encourage readers to contact me with suggestions for topics you’d like to see included. This is, after all, a tool to help YOU do your job better, and I’m happy to delve into the graphics world to cover topics of common interest. (It doesn’t hurt that I like to talk either, so keep the ideas coming!)

Thanks for stopping by.