What is CMYK?
Posted by Martin on the 20th of November 2009 at 17:14:59
in the category "Printing" | 0 Comments | Post a comment
CMYK relates to the most common printing method in use today and it stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and BlacK (or Key Black to be more technically correct). These are the colours used to reproduce "full colour" onto paper and card.
"Full colour" is an illusion that is created by mixing tiny dots of these four colours. For example, an image of a blue sky would have a lot of cyan dots with a much lesser concentration of magenta dots and probably very few yellow and black ones, leaving the white of the paper to show through for the clouds.
If we look at the above image, it’s a dark night-time photograph so the ink would have to cover out nearly all the white of the paper, therefore requiring each of the plates to have heavy concentrations of dots. In printing terminology, this image would have to be "separated" so the correct combinations of the 4 colours will produce the colours we see.
The printing press transfers the ink from each plate one at a time to arrive at the "full colour" image. If you had a good magnifying glass and looked at the printed image you would see how the dots of ink sit on top of one another to create the illusion of full colour.
There is a lot more technical information relating to CMYK printing but there you have the basic concept of how it works.