What do cmyk stand for

When all three colors are combined to the lowest degree, or value, the result is black. Software such as photo editing programs use the RGB color mode because it offers the widest range of colors. CMYK does not include a white color because it is assumed that it will be printed on a white paper and depending on the percentage of each color that is used, the white from the paper will be used to fill the space, therefore making the shades appear lighter.

The Internet is set up to work exclusively with RGB colors and there is a simple explanation behind this. A digital monitor is made up of tiny units called pixels. These pixels are comprised of three light units, one for red, one for green, and one for blue.

The RGB values are applied to these pixels, thereby setting the luminosity for each of the light units in each pixel. It should be known that there is no perfect correlation between the two types of colors, but when converted, a very close match can be achieved. The CMYK color model process color, four color is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself.

CMYK refers to the four ink plates used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black. The CMYK model works by partially or entirely masking colors on a lighter, usually white, background. The ink reduces the light that would otherwise be reflected. If you've worked with a commercial printer for any length of time, it's likely that at some point they've asked you to supply your files in CMYK, or they may have told you that the color of your job shifted because your files had to be converted to CMYK.

However, in two-color separations where neither color is black, the darker of the two colors may be considered the Key Plate instead. Granted this is a technicality, since it can be readily observed that in desktop publishing applications that use the CMYK color space, K is always black.

This process of aligning the color separation plates to the Key Plate is known as Registration. To assist in this process, every plate will have a set of registration marks on it that must be aligned perfectly, or the resulting image will appear out of focus or blurry.