CMYK

Some of the color deficiencies can be overcome by using a fourth ink, black, which allows printing neutral tones and dark blacks and colors. Black also improves the contrast of an image and its apparent sharpness. Black, usually referred to as K to distinguish it from blue, makes up the fourth member of the printer s primaries, CMYK. 

The development of xerography has led to new technologies that some predict will eventually eradicate traditional offset printing machines. These new machines, which print in full CMYK color (printing terminology for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), such as Xeikon, use xerography but provide nearly the quality of traditional ink prints. 

Cyan-magenta-yellow-black, or CMYK (also called four-color) For print publications, where all shades of color are produced by layering screened dots of four standardized inks. 

Most publishers can switch electronically from CMYK to RGB, although it is always better to use the publisher s preferred format. Switching from one of the color formats to B W may produce unsatisfactory results, however. If the gray tones that result are hard to distinguish from each other, a figure that was intelligible in color can become meaningless in B W. For this reason, it is always better to prepare art that will be reproduced in black and white as B W. 

You can switch from RGB to CMYK color modes and vice versa. 

If you switch from either RGB or CMYK to B W, you will probably need to adjust the contrast of your photograph to get the black areas black and the white areas white. 

Printer software converting file as necessary for CMYK-based production system, such as ink jet printers. 

Marketing increasingly includes color images of items across wide range of media platforms. Websites are RGB, with newsprint and gloss-stock magazines both CMYK, but on very different substrates. 

Printers can supply printed versions of look-up tables as charts that can be used to calibrate back across the design workflow, either by eye or by equipment and software—some also offer related software (Spoonflower Inc., 2011). No matter what descriptive term is used, the charts are usually grids, with each square containing incrementally altering blends of colors. Some printers add in light versions of the standard CMYK inks to increase the range of producible colors. More primaries. 

Colorant. These are formulated for ink jets as reactive, acid, disperse, or pigment. Many printers use light versions of the CMYK inks to diffuse and disappear any spaces between the printed dots of ink. Others use an additional set of primaries, such as red, orange, blue, and a deep or dark black to extend the range of possible colors (SPGPrints, n.d.). 

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