COLOUR
No two humans see colour exactly the same way. New research shows that women may see colour in a whole new dimension (see below, ‘Women & Colour Vision’). This can make printing and colour matching a bit tricky!
ROY GBIV (RGB)
Roy isn’t a Russian Cowboy, but what visible White Light is made of: ROYGBIV (Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet). The basic or Primary Colours are RGB (Red Green Blue). This is Additive Colour - add RGB together and you get - WHITE!
It's what Humans see, and how TV and any video reproduce colour, including SCANNERS.
RGB is NOT suitable for printing, though photographs can usually be digitally printed without a problem (offset printing would show a huge colour shift and colour distortion).
Programs such as MS Word and Publisher use an RGB pallette. The solid and shaded RGB colours can look very diferent on other computers, and will generally always print poorly (distorted colour).
USES: Video (Monitors, TVs, Scanners, Digital Cameras)
SCHMIK (CMYK)
Printing with light is very difficult. Instead, toner or wet ink is used. These materials are opaque (you can't see through them like light), so the nearest equivalent to RGB is CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK or Key). CMYK is how your inkjet printer works. It is SUBTRACTIVE COLOUR, because if you add colours, you get BLACK.
Reproducing accurate colour is difficult because...
- There are 3 major ways to make Colour Images
- CMYK, Spot, RGB
- Most computers are not calibrated to any scale or to each other
- Most printers are not calibrated to computers or to each other
...and it all becomes a nightmare!
Full or Photographic Colour (also called Process Colour or 4 Colour Process) gives the illusion of full colour by using just the four colours of CMYK.
NOTE: look at a colour magazine very closely - you will see the page is made of dots, these are the dots of each screen for each colour of CMYK.
USES: full photo colour, or a wide range of shaded colours.
SPOT
Spot Colour (also called Pantone Matching System/PMS) is only used in wet ink printing. It is only suitable for a little bit or ‘spot’ of colour, where you might have a letterhead printed in one colour, or have a tiny piece in a second colour. Each individual colour used is mixed separately to a standard formula.
USES: a flyer, letter head or business card that uses solid bits of colour, up to 3 colours (more than that and it is cheaper and easier to use CMYK to get many colours and shades).
Why doesn’t it look the same as at home?
Your computer monitor and printer are not calibrated to ours. When we need fairly accurate colour, we use expensive swatch charts to dial in known values.
We calibrate our colour machines with a spectrometer daily, but even identical presses cannot be completely calibrated to each other.
Colour is very tricky. We use standards, calibration, and professional equipment to come as close as professionally possible.
Women and Colour Vision
a UK study (and other research) suggests that women have the potential to see more colour and shading range than men. It turns out that many men are colour deficient (non PC term: colour blind), due to their eye cones. Red and Green are often confused as the same colour. But women, due to double X chromosomes, have double the red cones, and some (about 2 to 3 percent) will have different types of red cones, enabling them to see more hues. An average human can see about 100 different shades in each RGB cone, and with science and maths, that works out to 1 million different colours. But some women, with the extra-range red cone, can see 100 million colours.