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Monday, 14 January 2019

Printing Colors - Lost In Translation

Color printing or modern lithography has become a key aspect of advertising for the present business needs. Color creates depth in a logo or a business card. A black & white and dull business card is unattractive. Texture and color in any business card can make the businessman pop out from the rest. A company that has its corporate colors well thought out can impact the market with a brute force.

Printing Colors


Seeing is believing, and what we see first in the advertising industry are colors and shapes. Many Dubai based marketing projects complain that the colors they wanted on their logos did not come out as they designed it on their monitors and laptops. That's when the concerned printing companies explains that it is almost impossible to match those colors. Here's why.

Bi-standard inks

The color we see on our laptops and monitors is generated from an RGB color palette. The RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. The laptop monitor is black and different combinations of the monitor pixels are turned on, at varying intensity, to make different colors. 

Turning all the Red, Blue and Green pixels makes the screen white. The RGB color palette is, therefore, an additive color mode, which means that a color is added over the black of the monitor or the Black is NOT 'subtracted' by a filter to display the important color. (Black cannot be subtracted anyway)

On the other hand,  the printing press companies in Dubai and the wider world use the CYMK color palette. The CYMK stands for Cynan, Yellow, Magenta, and Key (Black). Printers have to use this palette — the reason being that in most cases, printers are printing on white paper. 

So unlike the monitor or laptop in front of you which has a black base, printed material has a WHITE paper base. To bring out the color on a white background requires more product to be plastered over the white of the paper. 

Instead, colors are used to filter the white such that required color is brought out. The CYMK is, therefore, a subtractive color mode, which means that the pigment on the white paper subtracts from the white to bring out the new color.

The problem

While there are better and better image translators available in the market, absolutely perfect color reading from one color system to the other is nearly impossible. There are color segments in each color mode that are unable to be translated into the other for those colors Pantone process colors are used, which are more expensive to print. 

Hence due to the laws that govern light and photon wavelengths, a Professional printing press can only be 99.99% accurate on color but never 100%.


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