The Science of Color
> KELBY ONE.COM
[ 51 ]The same silliness arises when I still hear someone say,
“But printing is CMYK.” Nope, nope, and nooooope. Is it true
that commercial printing still heavily relies on CMYK process
printing? Yes. Is that the color image mode and format we
need to follow for print? Nope, nope, and nooooope. But
let’s cover some important details here.
CMYK is an extremely small color gamut; the space
struggles with royal blues and certain other hues. In the
Color Picker shown here, the Gamut Warning shows a gray
cloud of hues indicating that you can’t print that color in
CMYK. Anything shown as gray is unprintable on a CMYK
printer as a process print.
Is CMYK still something you should be concerned with?
Absolutely. It’s still heavily used by laser printers in most
offices, or if you’re printing at places such as OfficeMax,
FedEx (Kinkos), or someplace similar. Chances are they’reusing a CMYK laser printer. This is why your business
graphics don’t come out right when you send it to those
service providers. You’ve most likely included colors that
are out of gamut for CMYK, and the device will convert
those colors into what’s known as “the nearest neighbor.”
In truth, it’s never the nearest, but it’s close. See the little
warning hazard symbol in the Color Picker dialog above?
When you click on that, it will jump to what it thinks is the
nearest equivalent color that’s printable in CMYK.
The point is that, just like the rules we talked about
earlier, you need to know what your target output device
will be so you can check your image colors against the
profile, or at least the color gamut, that the specific device
uses for output. If anything looks funky, you need to edit
your file until you’re happy with the results that can be
achieved by that device.
If you made it this deep into the article, you may
be thinking, “How do I check to make sure my colors
are in gamut for my device?” That’s a good question,
which means you’re starting to understand the fun-
damental workflow and how to get the results you
expected with regard to the relationship of colors in
your image. Keep in mind that how an image looks on
a screen that pushes out light, versus a piece of paper
that’s absorbing/reflecting light, is always going to be
slightly different. But our goal here is to make sure the
relationship of colors is the same. You can brighten and
darken an image after your first test print to compensate
for the paper, but you also have to make sure the colors
are right!