RGB and CMYK Colour Guide
In order to ensure that your print material looks exactly as you have designed it, it is important that you understand the nuances between the two common colour standards, RGB and CMYK, and take all necessary steps when designing your logo, images, or pictures.
RGB
Scanners and digital cameras create and store images using a combination of just three colours: Red, Green and Blue (called "RGB" or additive colours). These colours are used by all television and computers monitors to display images.
CMYK
Printing presses, on the other hand, print full colour pictures using a different set of colours, the primary colours of pigment ink: Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black/Koal (called "CMYK" or subtractive colours). This is "4-colour process" or "full-colour printing" used by the global printing industry.
When building your logo, image or design, you need to make sure you are in CMYK mode.
You can use any of the following software to convert to the CMYK colour space:
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Adobe PageMaker
Adobe Photoshop
Corel Draw
MS Publisher
Quark Xpress
Xara Xone
All RGB files must be translated to CMYK in order to print properly on a printing press.
If you don't have any of these software, all images, logos, and designs will automatically be converted to CMYK. Colours will be altered from your original design.
RGB has a much larger colour space. As a result, there will always be a loss of colour tones when converting from RGB to CMYK. Even though monitors always use RGB to display colours, the colours you see on your monitor will more closely match the final printed piece if you are viewing them in the CMYK colour space.
Optimalprint.com will simply do a standard conversion to CMYK, in order to guarantee that all images are in CMYK format before they are printed.
Note that Optimalprint.com is not responsible for less-than-perfect results if you furnish your images in RGB.
