What is CMYK in Printing?

What is CMYK in Printing?

The CMYK acronym stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key: those are the colours used in the printing process. A printing press uses dots of ink to make up the image from these four colours.

‘Key’ actually means black. It’s called Key because it’s the main colour used to determine the image outcome. Black ink provides depth and shading, whereas the other colours create different colours on the spectrum depending on how they are mixed. For example, cyan and yellow create a green when one is overlaid on the other.

What Does ‘Key’ Mean in CMYK?

There’s some argument regarding the origin of ‘Key’ to mean black. Some people say it’s because representing black with ‘B’ could confuse it with ‘blue’, but this is unlikely. It may be because the black plate is?the ‘key’ plate on a printing press?that aligns the other three colours to it (so the layers match up perfectly for the final image). This means any colour plate, in theory, could be the ‘K’ in this process, if black were not being used.

A further argument suggests that?‘Key’ refers to the very old presses?waaayyy back in 1843 that used screw keys to determine the amount of ink required to achieve the desired end result.

CMYK vs RGB

Ever printed something out on your home or office printer and noticed the colours look a little off? Before you start thinking you’re going crazy, don’t worry – this can happen if you’re using the wrong colours profile.

Your computer screen works in RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and not CMYK. It might seem that this doesn’t make a difference to the final product when you’re designing something, but it does!

A colour monitor that isn’t set up to view CMYK will show you different colours to the ones that may be printed. This is because the RGB spectrum is much, much broader than CMYK, so colours can be created in this palette that won’t be available in CMYK.

There is a very clear differentiation between RGB and CMYK in the way the colours work. RGB is additive, while CMYK is subtractive. What this means is:

• RGB colours are added to a black canvas to build an image
• CMYK colours are added to a white canvas to remove other colours from the visual spectrum

CMYK "Halftones" and Understanding the Process

?halftone is simply a group of large and small dots that when viewed at a distance, have the appearance of continuous shades of gray or color in an image.?

Halftone printing is a reprographic technique of breaking up an image into a series of dots in order to reproduce the full tone and color range of a photograph or monotone art work.?This process simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying in size and spacing.?This process also uses various line screens and frequencies to create various densities and a wide range of reproducible colors.?This line screen is also referred to as LPI (lines per inch).?The line screen is the frequency that will control the depth of the colors, the amount of dots.?For example, photorealisitc images have an optimal line screen of 65, while simple color images would have an optimal line screen of 35.?LPI (lines per inch) is NOT the same as DPI (dots per inch), which is another common printing term you've most likely heard as well.?

The other factor involved in printing halftone images is what angle to output the dot pattern at.?The angle is very important in order for the image to look correct.?For example, if you have the incorrect angle and line screen combination, you will get a "Moiré" effect which makes the dot pattern appear like a checkerboad pattern and not a smooth image.

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