94
votes
Accepted
Who first discovered CMYK?
According to Joe Scout the first company to use CMYK in printing was Eagle Printing Ink Company and the year was 1906. It was not until 1956 that it became a standard as a result of Pantone trying to ...
45
votes
Who first discovered CMYK?
CMYK is an improvement over CMY which itself is improvement over RYB model, which has been used for centuries (if not millennia).
It's really hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, ...
32
votes
Who first discovered CMYK?
There is no single definable point when the CMYK Process Colour printing was discovered. High fidelity process colour reproduction printing has been a gradual series of technical refinements.
The ...
28
votes
Accepted
How to make my logo color look the same in Web & Print?
here is the technical answer
Saying that the color is #dd0017 is meaningless, unless it is paired with information about what color space you are using! Therefore also conversion from #dd0017 to CMYK ...
23
votes
How can I detect if a color is gray
With full credit to @Wolff for these images. As was discussed, grey is 100% relative to lighting, surrounding colors, perception, and the method you are measuring. Take these images for example. The ...
18
votes
Who first discovered CMYK?
In 1906, the Eagle Printing Ink Company incorporated the four-colour
wet process inks for the first time. These four colours were cyan,
magenta, yellow, and black (also known as key), hence the ...
17
votes
Are spot colors limited and why CMYK mix is not treated same as spot color mix?
Simply:
CMYK is not mixed. A printing process generally do not mix colors. It is kind of the holy grail of printing processes but it does not really exist as of yet.
What happens instead is that ...
16
votes
Accepted
What are the pros and cons of using Lab color?
Lab Primer
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. (Yeats)
Lab, which I often read as Lab but is properly said L-a-b, is amazing. It makes the world a ...
16
votes
Are spot colors limited and why CMYK mix is not treated same as spot color mix?
TLDR: No, spot colours are not more limited than CMYK, and they aren't treated the same because they are different printing processes.
Process printing (or CMYK printing, also sometimes called full-...
13
votes
I select a color in Photoshop and it's painting another one
Set the tool's blend mode to Normal before painting with it.
11
votes
How to convert RGB colors into CMYK (real paint colors)?
Converting to CMYK won't help you unless you find CMYK specific paint, which I'm not sure exists. Commerical paint manufacturers use a variety of non-standardized ways of expressing colour - so try ...
11
votes
Why aren't there printers that use red-green-blue ink cartridges?
To understand why printers do not use red, green, and blue ink to reproduce color from the light spectrum, you need to research CMYK printing.
I'll avoid all the additive/subtractive explanation.
...
11
votes
Why aren't there printers that use red-green-blue ink cartridges?
Actually, there already exist printing systems which let you choose your colors. In screen or offset printing you can use any existing color to print something.
Now lets say we'd choose red, green ...
10
votes
Accepted
Why aren't there printers that use red-green-blue ink cartridges?
Introduction
To understand this we need to look at the entire system. The system consists of at least 3 parts: the observers brain, light transfer to the eye and the technical system from where it ...
9
votes
Accepted
Should I use Hex or RGBA when designing a website?
The browser doesn't really care which format the color is in, performance is negligible. As such, I'll focus on the decision's effects on the developer(s) and the use cases.
A lot of developers find ...
9
votes
Accepted
Help me understand how the "RGB Colorspace Atlas" by artist Tauba Auerbach was made
The title of the article 'Tauba Auerbach’s RGB Colorspace Atlas Depicts Every Color Imaginable' is misleading.
As you already said RGB is intended for screen display and not print. It is - as far as ...
9
votes
Are spot colors limited and why CMYK mix is not treated same as spot color mix?
Alright a typical printer has 4 cartridges, CMYK. It looks kinda like this with the black cartridge usually a bit larger because it gets used more frequently:
If you print on this printer and the ...
9
votes
How can I detect if a color is gray
RGB or actually the saturation in its polar coordinate equivalents is highly nonlinear when one tries to use it as a measure for "how near grey this RGB color seems to be when watched on the ...
8
votes
Accepted
Regular colors vs Muted colors
There's no exact value that says, "this is muted" but "this is not muted."
If I were to come up with one on the spot as a general starting point I'd say use the HSB color spectrum and lower your ...
8
votes
How to make my logo color look the same in Web & Print?
Matching colours between screen and print is a complex and sometimes impossible task. Due to the nature of light (Screens, RGB) versus ink (CMYK, Pantones, etc) and the fact that pretty much every ...
7
votes
Accepted
Why does the color model still matter?
Even if I use RGB Colors in inDesign and print the document, I will still get the right colors on the printout
Nope.
There are 2 primary reasons as to why there is no guarantee that your chosen RGB ...
7
votes
How to convert RGB colors into CMYK (real paint colors)?
RGB is an additive color model using light directly from its source before it is reflected off of an object. In essence, you start in darkness and because you are directly viewing the light source, ...
7
votes
Accepted
How to convert RGB colors into CMYK (real paint colors)?
Real color is a quite complex subject. In essence color is something that happens somewhere between your cornea and brain. Simplifying this a bit color is what you sense when some photons interact ...
7
votes
Accepted
How to create a color of the same brightness and saturation?
This is exactly what the HSB colour model is for. You have almost exactly named the model's variables in your question:
Hue is the 'kind' of colour: red, blue, orange, yellow;
Saturation is inverse ...
7
votes
What are the shades of green?
Your question makes sense but there's no answer. These are all arbitrary names created by man to help classify spectrums. Green doesn't magically end at point X and start point Y. There's simply put ...
7
votes
Lab Color Space in photoshop
There are 3 questions here: What is the purpose of Lab? Why is it in Photoshop? and Why is a color value different in RGB than it is in Lab. There is a ton of litterature on color spaces and Lab is an ...
6
votes
Accepted
Do designers use different color palettes for web and print design?
Yes, You should create a brand guideline for your startup. Specify a Pantone (which will be easy to get a CMYK value from), RGB and HEX for each color swatch.
Google brand guidelines or identity ...
6
votes
Who first discovered CMYK?
The three- and four-color process was invented by Jacob Le Blon around 1725. His original color model used RYB (red, yellow, blue) and RYBK (red, yellow, blue, and black). He wrote a book called The ...
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