To ensure that we use the exact color that you require, color systems were developed. The most common of the spot color standards is the Pantone Matching System or, PMS as it is more commonly known. All of the modern image-editing, vector-drawing and page-layout programs come with a full library of thousands of Pantone colors as part of the program).You should have a set of printed PMS swatch books that show examples of the colors and their codes. PMS swatches are a more truthful method of matching or choosing colors than doing so on-screen. This is because monitors are illuminated by light behind them which makes colors seem brighter on-screen than they are when printed on paper. Also, colors on a monitor are created with red, green and blue light (RGB) rather than mixed ink pigments. TOP

What is RGB Color?

Red

Green

Blue

RGB means Red, Green and Blue. CMYK is the color profile used for full-color printing, RGB are the colors that monitors and televisions use to present colors to you. The hardware used in monitors and televisions project beams of light to fill every pixel on your screen. RGB is an additive system which means that when you add the three colors together, you get white. When none of the colors are present, you get black (or the absence of light). Images that you find on the Internet are in RGB mode or a variation of it called indexed color. When scans are created they are, by default, in RGB. RGB images divide the information into three "channels" (one for each color) while CMYK photo files divide the color between four "channels." Therefore, CMYK images are bigger files and take up more space on transport media or a hard drive. For best color accuracy though, images should be scanned in the color mode of it's final use (CMYK for color printing and RGB for on-screen viewing).

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What is CMYK Color?

Cyan Plate	Magenta Plate

Yellow Plate	Black Plate

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CYAN

MAGENTA

YELLOW

BLACK

CMYK refers to the printing inks used in four-color process printing. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black are the colors used to produce full-color photographs and designs. (An approximate representation of these colors is above). These colors can be combined and printed to emulate a wide number of other colors. If you look carefully at a printed color photograph in any magazine or book, you'll see that it's made up of rows of tiny dots called a halftone screen. The dots work together, at different angles, to fool your eye into seeing a full spectrum of colors. For a graphics file to be printed in CMYK, it must be converted or created in that color mode. When film is pr oduced, a different sheet of film is created for each color. For the computer to tell the machine that produces the film, an imagesetter, what to put on each sheet of film, the computer image must be in CMYK format. Colors in a page layout program must also be specified in percentages of the four colored inks. So, why do we refer to these four ink colors as CMYK and not CMYB? Well, quite simply, it's so that no one will be confused into thinking that the last color is Blue rather than Black.
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