Being a graphic designer for a student organization is fun, but when you send your flyers for printing and find out they came out heavily saturated and dark, you get disappointed. My recent flyer had a nice blue shade in it (atleast on the screen), and in the final print, I almost couldn't distinguish it from black.. terrible! What I saw on the screen was the RGB version and what came out of the printer was a CMYK version. So what's causing this headache? Why can't CMYK bring up the same colors as the RGB version? I did some reading online and found that these two color profiles are complete opposites of each other. RGB adds color on a black background and CMYK absorbs color from a white background.
The lack of R,G and B colors gives black and mixing all RGB gives us white, but that's not the case with CMYK. If we mix C, M and Y, we don't really get black but a sort of grey and we need to add a fourth color K which represents black.
I still find all this quite difficult to comprehend. So while making my latest flyer, I made sure I worked on the CMYK file in Photoshop. The colors were not exact but close and I could manage. I obviously couldn't get the crisp bright colors that we would get with working in RGB. But I faced another problem with exporting the files.
Since I am not the person who would be taking the prints, I had to give the highest quality JPG files to the person responsible. On saving the CMYK file as a JPG, I noticed it appeared different in different image viewers. Here is an animated GIF of 3 cropped screenshots of the image viewed in Photoshop, Firefox, and Picasa.
The big question is, what will the file look like to the guy who is printing it? What if he uses Picasa Viewer to print the file? Would I get a print that is only CMY with no K ? What if he uses Firefox to print the file? Would it come out oversaturated and dark? Sounds like how my earlier RGB exported prints used to come out. What if he had some other kind of image viewer which would make this picture look even more different? I guess the truth will come out only after the first test print. It all depends on the kind of image viewer and the type of printer he's using. I am almost ready to bet whatever I'm seeing here will definitely not come out on the final print despite using the CMYK profile. The answer to these questions will come out in a couple of days.. and probably from then on, I can rectify/modify my exported files.
The lack of R,G and B colors gives black and mixing all RGB gives us white, but that's not the case with CMYK. If we mix C, M and Y, we don't really get black but a sort of grey and we need to add a fourth color K which represents black.
I still find all this quite difficult to comprehend. So while making my latest flyer, I made sure I worked on the CMYK file in Photoshop. The colors were not exact but close and I could manage. I obviously couldn't get the crisp bright colors that we would get with working in RGB. But I faced another problem with exporting the files.
Since I am not the person who would be taking the prints, I had to give the highest quality JPG files to the person responsible. On saving the CMYK file as a JPG, I noticed it appeared different in different image viewers. Here is an animated GIF of 3 cropped screenshots of the image viewed in Photoshop, Firefox, and Picasa.
