Topic awaiting preservation: CMYK (Page 1 of 1)

OK, I know RGB and HSV so well that if you gave me a color name I could give you the values in those schemes. But what's this CMYK stuff? How does it work? I'm posting this here because I think it has something to do with printing...

Oooh that's a doozie slime.
C=Cyan (which is an aqua looking color)
M=Magenta
Y=Yellow
K=Black (not b so as not to be confused with blue)

Ok, CMY are the primary subtractive colors. Meaning, for example that, Cyan ink, when applied to paper, absorbs all light colors except for Cyan. When adding all three together (in theory) they produce black. However it's a muddy black, so black is added to make shadows deeper. Yeah so they're the Primary printing inks...All colors in printed on anything are generated from a mixture of those 4 inks or spot colors. That's a whole different story though. Does that answer your question?

hehe well thanks fig


[This message has been edited by Jeni (edited 09-18-2001).]

Nicely answered Jeni

Chris (who's learning all this print stuff now)


KAIROSinteractive

hehehe, well, hehehe, i can't help it.... is the only thing that i have in english, and i think that i mention CMYK somewhere: #

[This message has been edited by Wakkos (edited 09-18-2001).]

Spot colour is best described to webgeeks (screengeeks) as a form of dithering for shade and saturation.

Printing always goes by the adage that all surfaces are white. If we assume that the print surface is white, then in the same way that gif dithering looks like a fading colour, printing colour "spots" with small expanses of whitespace between them will look like a lightening/desaturating shade of that spot colour.

Increase the whitespace progressively, and you get a false gradient.

If a low saurated darker tone is needed, spot colours are often mixed in with dots of black, or midtones of another shade to created that blended looking colour. Like halftones, you can look closely and see the dithering of different shades to create that specific tone.

So spot coluring is sort of the process of tricking the eye into seeing different blends of colours as a different shade than its components.

Yep, just think dither, then get reeeeeeeal close

And this saves jeni a few words, so she can continue to swallow the fist and not type.

heh




ICQ:# 10237808

Well put...of course, I don't know too much about the web stuff...But yeah, where with CMYK (also referred to as process or 4 color process) is usual screens and solids of the 4 different colors, spot is just using one color and screens of it...That could be just about any color you could think of...which includes metallic inks and colors that just can't be achieved with using 4 color process. People often use Spot blues because process blues just aren't as bright.

Hey you watch it there buddy or you'll be the one swallowing my fist
*I knew that tutorial would come back to haunt me*

[Semi-off topic]

- The letter K in CMYK is actually said to mean "Key color" according to my ol' printing technique teacher.

One thing I noticed when a couple of my classmates went out for lunch is that if you see some young (well not jurassic-age anyway) people holding magazines extremely close to their face they might actually not be extremely shortsighted. They may be students, just checking print quality and trying to detect what kind of raster (is that the correct english word?) being used. I saw half of my class doing that after we learned about those things.

"Ohh. look. I think this mag is printed with stochastic raster film....or could it just be like a 175lpi..."

That's geeky for ya

[/Semi-off topic]


[e]
Oh, and Slime! Don't forget that CMYK has a much narrower color space than RGB. Some of the more vibrant colors is not possible to achieve in standard 4-color process print[/e]





[This message has been edited by Nimraw (edited 09-19-2001).]

Oooh, I see! I printed out a color gradient on my printer... i'm assuming it works in CMYK because I can see that the yellow, cyan, and violet (magenta) areas are done in only one color, and if i look real close other dots have been printed as i look along the gradient towards red, green, or blue. And this gradient also fades to black at the bottom, and I can see the black dots appear down there.

OK, I get it now, thanks =)

(Ooooh, now I *really* get it! magenta, yellow and cyan are what I was taught to be "red, yellow and blue" in elementary school, the primary colors! OK, wow, this is cool, thanks a lot everyone =)

This was a double post that I can't seem to delete, so.....

[This message has been edited by Jeni (edited 09-19-2001).]

Oops, no the primary colours you thought of in school as red, yellow, and blue were correct.
CMY are primary ink colours in the world of four colour process printing...
Sorry about the confusion.

*Added "u" to color to appease VP *

Believe it or not, I learned the basics of CMYK by reading ... gasp ... the Photoshop maual!!!! Pretty cool, eh?
But that was just the basics, I'm picking up all sorts of new information every day here at my cool new newspaper job. Screwed up two color ad jobs recently. Somehow didn't separate the colors properly both times. Still not real clear on what I did wrong, but before I do my next color ad, I will harassing one of the print shop guys to look things over before I turn it in!!
You're never too old to learn, eh?

BeeKay
Murphy's 50 Laws of Combat Operations
11. Try to look unimportant -- the enemy may be low on ammo.
23. When in doubt -- empty your magazine.

BeeKay - screwed up how? bad color? Too dark?

One job was real simple. An ad for a local car lot, originally done in b/w. Just add a yellow background (in Quark by adding a new box filled with yellow in the background). Print in two plates: black and yellow. Easy, right?
Well, the yellow plate was just one solid block of yellow, and the black was normal. Final product had the entire ad being yellow, to include the cars, text, etc having a yellow tint over them.
Needed to somehow "knock out" the cars and such from the yellow background I guess so that the yellow plate wasn't solid yellow. Make any sense? Next time I gotta work on something like that, I'll be asking what needs to be done before I send to print, eh?

BeeKay
Murphy's 50 Laws of Combat Operations
11. Try to look unimportant -- the enemy may be low on ammo.
23. When in doubt -- empty your magazine.

Yeah weird that it turned out that way. We normally overprint black type except for a few instances...You're saying that the greyscale graphics overprinted the yellow? Interesting...I'm sure that's a bit mucky indeed. It is case of just needing to knock those items out, or at least that's what it sounds like...Next time, don't forget that you can always run seps to your laser before sending it to film It's timely, but hey, so is re-outputting film

What's wrong with yellowcars?


Maybe a clipping path would have helped.

I state that yellow cars are evil. Especially crazy future cars (like the one I saw in downtown Denver last month).