Colour

CMYK and RGB

Most digital devices: monitors, cameras, etc; display images in RGB, or Red , Green, Blue. So a monitor has lots of small clusters of Red, Green, Blue dots and makes all the colours from them.

Most print however is made up of CMYK, Cyan (Blue), Magenta (Red), Yellow and Black.

To print your documents our print presses must have CMYK documents, but, all our documents are pre-processed to make them CMYK - so, regardless of whether you upload RGB or CMYK we can still print your documents.

The main problem is what colour actually then gets printed. If you upload CMYK then that's exactly what will be printed and you will get a very good colour match. If you upload RGB our process will "interpret" the document to CMYK - most colours match quite nicely, others do not and there may be a noticeable colour shift.

Best practice is to always upload CMYK.

Process and Spot Colour

A process colour is made up of four colours (CMYK), where as in traditional Litho printing, some inks are mixed specifically to match a colour, these are called Spot colours, usually taken from the Pantone swatch, just like a paint swatch. Some colours are poorly represented by CMYK and some are impossible, like metallics colours; silver, bronze, gold.

Things to Avoid

There are several challenges, first, regardless of what format you are using (RGB or CMYK), the colour can only be seen on your colour monitor, which is RGB and unless it has been colour calibrated it will not show you the exact colour anyway. Secondly, whilst our print process will automatically convert all colours to CMYK, it is not always possible to get an exact match. Lastly, colour will change depending on what paper (stock) it is printed on, gloss and laminated paper will make the colours look richer. Here are some tips to get the best out of your print:

• Try to avoid using very light tints of colour as these are prone to print much lighter than you expect. As a digital press can vary by 5%, if you attempt to print cream (5% yellow), it could move to white (0% yellow) or light yellow (10% yellow).
• Try to avoid large areas of the same colour too, it will be very easy to see even the slightest colour variation. It is much better to use textures or images.
• Avoid using white (or light) text of less than 8 pt. on black (or dark) backgrounds.

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