Colours

Colours

With colour printing, it is important to remember that what you see on a screen will always be slightly different in print. Colour on a screen reacts to the brightness of the light behind it, where as ink will respond the brightness of the paper it is printed on. When approaching colour for print, you will notice there are a few different colour modes available including RGB and CMYK.

RGB is the colour system used for screen and stands for:

R – red G – green B – blue

Colour for print is always in CMYK format. Sometimes referred to as four colour or process colour. CMYK stands for:

C – cyan M – magenta Y – yellow K – black

Pantone

Pantone is simply a colour management system. It is possible to Pantone match colour for offset printing which gives you greater accuracy and options than digital. Because the inks are either used straight from the tin or physically mixed together, offset printing gives you a much broader choice of colour and therefore the ability to match colour exactly is very possible to achieve. Digital colour printing does have its limits, for example the ability to print in vibrant, fluorescent ink, or metallics is only possible with offset or screen print. Digital printing is generally used for smaller runs whereas offset is used for larger runs, this is generally because of the costs involved with creating individual plates. It is possible to create very unique prints with processes such as over printing by combining both CMYK with additional Pantone colours on top. Often a brand needs to match a colour exactly, for example on a logo, this is where Pantone is used to perfectly match the desired colour exactly, because they actually use Pantone inks.