CMYK & RGB Color Explained

Process colors

Take a magnifying glass or a strong pair of reading glasses and look very closely at a full color page of Appaloosa Journal (or any printed magazine). Do you see how all the colors are actually made up of tiny dots of ink?

What looks like a full range of colors is actually an illusion. What you see are images made up of only four colors of ink, known as the “process colors” — cyan (blue), magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). When dots of these four inks overlap, they produce a broad range of colors. All "full color" prints are made this way.

On a printing press are four ink rollers — one with each of these colors. The press prints these inks, one on top of the other* to make the color pages you see in your magazine. The following example shows you how the cover for the November 2000 issue was made:

One roller prints CYAN ink on the paper.	The next roller prints MAGENTA on top of the cyan ink.

Another roller prints YELLOW ink on top of the magenta ink.	And lastly, BLACK ink goes over the top of the three colored inks to give you the final image.

Most printing presses start with the yellow ink, then the cyan, magenta and black. Since yellow by itself is hard to see, we started here with cyan to show you how the process works.

Printed colors versus screen colors

You can put a drop of water on your screen or take your magnifying glass and look very closely at a white area of your computer moniter. (This also works with a TV screen.) You will see that the “white” area is also an illusion. What appears white is actually three colors of light combining to create white. The three colors are red, green and blue (RGB). A “cell” of your computer screen, when viewed closely, will look something like this:

All the colors you see on your screen are a combination of red, green and blue rays of light. When all three colors are at their brightest level (255, 255, 255), we see bright white. When all three are off (0, 0, 0), we see black. To make all the colors in between, these three colors glow at different levels of brightness. For example, the cyan color you see at left is made by having the red off, the green bright, and the blue very bright (0, 180, 250).

You may have also noticed, that the pure red, green and blue pictured above are very bright. Because these vibrant colors are made of rays of light, we cannot reproduce them using the four process inks.**

As you can imagine, four colors of ink produce different results than three colors of light. This is why you might sometimes find that what you print out looks so different from what you see on your screen. (This is also why we ask you to convert all your files to CMYK when you are designing an ad for our magazine.)

To see this in action, try making an image in RGB mode, using the brightest colors you can. You will get an image that looks very vibrant, like this:

Look what happens to those bright colors of light, when you convert them to colors made with ink:

You can see clearly that the picture becomes dull. A piece of paper with ink on it simply cannot glow the same way an electric light source does.

**Some companies make special kinds of fluorescent inks that can come closer to producing these very bright colors on paper. One of these speical inks can be added as a "fifth color" (also known as a “PMS color”, or “spot color”) to your full color ad for an addtional fee. If you need a non-process ink used in your ad, please contact us for details.