What's Up With The Color?

Color management is a vexing issue for many of us. There are people who dedicate their whole careers to this very issue. You don't need to be one of them. But you should have some basic understanding about color.

To understand why the color your printer spits out is different from what you see on your monitor you need to understand additive vs. subtractive color and how you perceive color. WARNING: this is a very simplistic explanation. It is meant to be a quick overview, not a dissertation.

When you are looking at a magazine, you are seeing subtractive color. The printer mixes varying amounts of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks to produce different colors. Light shines on the printed page and all the colors of the spectrum are absorbed into the page (hence "subtractive") EXCEPT the colors you see.

When you are looking at the page layout for that very same magazine on the monitor your eyes are processing additive color. Your monitor is shining varying amounts of Red, Green and Blue light which is how you see the colors on your screen. Red and Green light ADD to form Yellow. Blue and Green ADD to form Cyan. If the entire spectrum is added together you get white.

OK? Additive color = reflected color. Subtractive color = direct light. Again, this is very simplistic so we can move on to the problem at hand - how can we move what we see and like on the monitor to the printer?

To some extent you can't. RGB (subtractive color) is able to produce the full spectrum of color that humans can see. CMYK (additive color) cannot do this. The answer is to manage, as much as you can, what you see on your monitor and the color palettes you are using.

If you can use a CMYK palette in your software, that will help since you will only be able to choose from a mix of those inks. If you need to be more precise, it is best to select a Pantone spot color. These are inks that are callibrated to be the same hue no matter where they are printed or what press they are printed on. If you are not going to press, and use a digital printer instead, they can be converted to process (CMYK) color for a very close approximation.

Color errors can be very costly. You don't want to send a job to print expecting to get red and the proofs come back pink. Understanding and managing these issues ahead will save money and aggrivation down the road.

There are many resources online to help you delve deeper into these issues if you are interested.

> Quark has a forum dedicated to color management issues.

> Graphics.com has a forum dedicated to print production.