About

Colors can be created in printing with color spaces based on the CMYK color model.

Color Printing Cmyk

Printers and others who use modern subtractive color methods and terminology use magenta, yellow, and cyan as subtractive primaries.

The gamut is the area on color wheel surface that represents as far as the device can go in all directions.

Numerisation to Printing process (Color Space Transformation)

Because the most convenient color model is the RGB model for processing a digital image, the printing process requires transforming the image:

During this process, the colors from the RGB which are out of gamut must be somehow converted to approximate values within the CMYK space gamut. Simply trimming only the colors which are out of gamut to the closest colors in the destination space would burn the image.

There are several algorithms approximating this transformation, but none of them can be truly perfect, since those colors are simply out of the target device's capabilities. This is why identifying the colors in an image which are out of gamut in the target color space as soon as possible during processing is critical for the quality of the final product.

4 colors printing

With Color - CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black Color Model)