(n); Freelance artist and designer based in San Diego, CA who lives together with an adorable Holland Lop named Latte. This blog contains illustrations, works in progress, and commentary related to my artwork. Additionally, bunnies.  (archive)

Tags: #art / #ask / #giveaway / #illustration / #resource / #text / #wip

oh look, cats: okay will someone please explain to me what the deal is with CMYK and printing

cryptovolans:

up until now, people have kept telling me that pictures will print better if you change them to CMYK format.

So I finally tried it. And it made my picture look completely godawful.

From what I understand, CMYK reduces the amount of colors. So wait, why do people keep saying that this is…

To echo: work from the beginning in CMYK. Some colors (specifically really bright neon ones) do NOT print, so limiting your palette will make sure that all the colors you’ve used in your image are actually printable colors. This is the theory of pigment vs. light — when referring to light, all colors together create white light. This is how your computer screen works — when there’s no light, it’s black. Pigments are the opposite — white means there’s zero pigment, and when you put every pigment on paper, it becomes black. That beautiful shade of bright electric blue that I love to use? Or bright oranges or reds? Completely unprintable. Cry. Those colors appear bright and amazing on your monitor because your monitor is using light to display the colors. 

The other thing is that you need to make sure to use as little K as possible in your colors except for the lineart. CMYK stands for the four colors a printer will use to mix and print your image: cyan(C), magenta(M), yellow(Y), and black (K). The black inks tend to be very harsh on your image and if you use a ton of K in your painting, you won’t be able to see the differentiation between colors because… well.. you’ve saturated your whole image with black. It’s kind of the same reason you want to avoid using black with watercolor paintings, and instead you can blend a shade of black using other pigments instead. So, when you’re using colors in Photoshop, if you’re painting an area “black”, you can set your colors to 100% C, 100% M, 100% Y, and 0% K, and you will get a deep grey that will print as a dark grey, darker than it appears on your monitor, and won’t have the same harshness as if you had used K. This is a hard concept to explain in words because on printed paper, you can see where you used 100% K due to the way the ink tends to gloss and have a raised surface on the paper. Building a swatch palette in Photoshop or whatever else you use to paint in will help keep the K out of your image. 

Seasoned professionals are probably really good at not using any K in their pieces but I always end up throwing in about 40% K max in any part of my image that’s not linework. Oops. 

You also might want to try a higher quality printer or a printer that does color matching. For really awesome accurate color printing, I recommend catprint.com (and no, I’m not affiliated). I know some other printers are now able to color match to RGB files, but I don’t have any personal experience.

That was pretty long, sorry!

Posted on my blog in case other people would like to know this information and because my response was too long to post as a reply. 8)

Disclaimer: This is just advice, please take it with a grain of salt.

117 notes
Posted on Wednesday, November 9
Tagged as: printing   rant   text   resource  
Reblogged from: cryptovolans
Posted by: cryptovolans

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    you learn something new every day hm

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    Well that just cleared up a lifetime of crappy printing for me, thanks! :D

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