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CMYK Process Printing
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Duotones
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| What if we want green, but we don't have any green ink - only cyan and yellow? We could pour the two inks into a bucket and use the resulting concoction, but perhaps we don't want to deal with the sloppy and time consuming process of mixing a new ink every time we want to add a new color. Fortunately, there's a clever solution to our problem: we can print overlapping halftones of both inks. Instead of mixing the inks themselves, we allow the eye to mix the colors on the printed page.
With this technique, we can fool the eye into believing that it is seeing many different pure shades of green: |
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Shamrock
90C 100Y
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Radioactive Green
15C 83Y
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Bostonian Bread Mold
18C 25Y
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Teal
90C 31Y
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CMYK Process
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| By printing overlapping halftones of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK, we can produce a wide range of colors - wide enough to print realistic looking photographs. This technique, known as "CMYK process" printing, is in common usage throughout the United States and the world. [note: black is given the initial K to eliminate potential confusion with blue or brown] Look closely at any magazine, and you'll see the telltale tiny dots. |
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| The precise shades of the four "process" colors are standardized; in North America, almost all commercial printers use "SWOP" inks. SWOP stands for Standard Web Offset Press, a term originating from a particular type of press, usually used to print newspapers; SWOP inks are used for multitudinous other purposes. There are other ink sets in use, in Europe, Asia, and even in North America, but for the most part, SWOP rules this continent. Agreeing on a standard system of inks allows us to achieve predictable color reproduction for a job designed in Colorado but printed in New York, Alabama, California, or elsewhere. |
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Composite
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Cyan
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Magenta
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Yellow
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blacK
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