OUGD404: RGB v CMYK

RGB stands for red, green and blue, referring to a system that represents the colours that can be used on a computer display. The three colours can be combined in various proportions to obtain a colour in the visible spectrum. CMYK is a colour model used in the printing process, referring to the four inks of cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). As designers, we need to know when to use each one and a good rule to stick to is that if it is web based then it should always be in RGB and printed material should be in CMYK.   

Something I have learnt during Design Principles is that the setup of the document is important when printing digitally. The printers will only be able to accurately print out the onscreen colours if the document is setup to CMYK, so that it matches the inks in the printers. At the beginning of the year I had a printing problem were everything kept printing out much darker than what I had designed it to be. This was because the Adobe Illustrator had been set to RGB, something I was unaware would affect the final print so much. Fig. 1 shows the onscreen colour of the design and then fig. 2 shows the printed colour of the blue. It worked out ok because the whole set of designs all matched once printed, but they were not the intended colours that I designed them to be. 

Fig.1 

Fig. 2