4-Color Printing

4-Color Printing – The Method that printing presses print printed material. #CMYK #4ColorPrinting

4-Color Printing

It gets its name because it uses 4 colors that mix together to make all the colors needed for print. It uses Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y) and Black (K). You will often hear it called CMYK.

One thing to note, you do not want Registered Black for type. That is black on all 4 plates. Means Cyan 100, Magenta 100, Yellow 100 and Black 100. It often will cause misalignment and make the type look fuzzy. You will always want to use 100% Black. Same with grays, use a shading of K which is Black.

This is the standard printing used in newsprint, magazines, professional printing, off-set printers, etc.

Just FYI, some programs cannot set CMKY or RGB for your designs. That is why you need professional design software. RGB designs do not always convert well to CMKY, for example the black, like I mentioned, often will be more of a registered black or close to it.

These 4 colors mix together to make up ALL of the colors we could ever imagine to be used to be printed.

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