For the colour printing of your digital files, you have to supply the graphics and image in the optimum colour mode. Many software programs will let you to work on RGB colour or CMYK colour. RGB colours or Red-Green-Blue colours are known as the primary colours of the light. This colour combination can be seen on your t.v. or computer monitors. The digital cameras and scanners also produce images with Red-Green-Blue colour combinations. Red-Green-Blue colour mode should be in use while taking photos that have to be viewed on a monitor, emails or CD.
All the colours of the light spectrum are created from primary colours, but monitors can display only limited colour range from the visible spectrum. Light is sent from the monitor, and the printing ink recognizes only a particular wavelength of colours. The three primary colours are combined together to produce white. If the three primary colours are absent, the light will appear as black. By combining a variety of intensities of RGB colours, each mixture produces different colours. A monitor of a television or a computer is made of small units called pixels. Each pixel contains three units of light, and each unit represents red, green and blue.
We can not actually see the individual pixels with the naked eye because they are so small. Each pixel is created by applying correct values of RGB, and without the proper values of the colour units, you will not see any image displayed on the screen. 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 simplest 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, and these characters are 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 programme 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 refer 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 differing colours. When three additive colours are combined, the combination will produce white colour. But when three subtractive colours are combined, the combination produces black. This difference results in a large diversity between the resulting print and the screen display. Additive colour projects the light from the monitor, and if more light is projected from a specific pixel, it will be closer to the pure light. In the case of printer inks, they 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, providing the impression of a variety of colours. If you are combining more colours, then more light will be absorbed by the ink and a lesser amount of light will be reflected to the eye, which results in darker colour. Black ink produced by the CMYK colours is not the strong black. So you will need to add some black ink to produce the best results for printing true black. To get a stronger shade of any colour, you need to add black in CMYK mode.
What about the lighter shade of colours? As white ink cannot be created using CMYK colours, you have to work with the idea that you are printing the colours on a white paper. Since tiny dots of inks are used to print images you have to use the inks in lower percentage to receive lighter shades so that more white colour is visible among the dots. The values of CMYK colours are calculated with the help of 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%. However, when 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 the colour modes have limitations. The images resulting using RGB mode cannot be converted smoothly into CMYK mode because of the brightness of the RGB colours. Similarly, CMYK colours can not be translated to RGB mode as 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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