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Complimentary Colors Used in Color Printing
What are the 3 complimentary colors used in color printing?
August 08, 2002
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Piper Lehman |
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Magenta, yellow and cyan are the true primary colors used in art, and are the process colors for news and magazine printing. RGB--or red, green and blue (and black as a separate ink)--are the three colors used in inkjet color printing. Technically, you can get black by using only your RGB cartridge, but it doesn't look black to me. I'm not really sure if I answered your question. Hope this helps.
August 08, 2002
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John A. Lind |
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Some clarification is needed here about the relationship between art, printing, RGB and CMY . . . Art and Pigments:
The three traditional primary pigments for traditional oil painting are Red, Yellow and Blue. The "secondaries" are created by mixing two of the primaries, and they are Green, Purple and Orange. The reason is true cyan and magenta pigments are (were) not available. In addition, pigmented paint primaries are subtractive because they are reflective. In other words, when illuminated by white light, the pigment subtracts out all color except what is reflected. Thus a pure red pigment subtracts out all green and all blue. With paints, mixing in more pigment(s) always makes the paint darker than at least the lightest pigment used. That is why painters start with a "white" space of canvas. Computer Monitors and Luminance:
A computer monitor is luminous, not reflective. It starts as a "black" space. Colors are added to it. The primaries are Red, Green and Blue. Add all the the colors completely and the screen turns white. As with paint pigments, add combinations of two primaries together to get the secondaries: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. These are also called the complementary colors. Printing and Filtering:
Offset printing uses transparent inks (as does most other types of printing). As with painting with oil paints, it is subtractive as it starts with a white space (the blank paper). Light travels through the inks, is filtered by it, and then reflects off of the white base under the inks. Its primaries are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Four-color also adds Black as this adds to the tonal range, true black is difficult to achieve by mixing the three primaries, and it saves the colored inks. One can use Red, Green and Blue for printing, but using CMYK (K = Black) is much easier. -- John
August 12, 2002
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