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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fast Learner" data-source="post: 5718185" data-attributes="member: 649">Adding to the CMYK info, in theory you can use only cyan, magenta, and yellow printing inks to create any color, but the reality is the same as if you mix blue, red, and yellow paints yourself: no matter how you balance them, the darkest you can make them is a muddy brown. The black ink (K is for "key", though it's also a useful way to distinguish it from the B in Blue) is essential for getting truly dark and even black tones.In printing, though one would think that 100% black ink provides a utterly deep black, the reality is that it's only a very deep charcoal color, one that can vary based on the desire to produce good looking photographs and flesh tones and such (ink densities are adjusted on the press at the beginning of the run and throughout to ensure that everything continues to look good). For that reason when preparing something for print you often create what's called a "rich black", a mix of black and the other three inks, to really deepen the color. The precise mixture can be varied in order to produce a "warmer" black (more magenta and yellow) or a "cooler" black (more cyan). While one might propose using 100% of all four colors to create the deepest possible black, on the press the paper gets far too wet when there's so much ink applied, either warping the paper or having the ink transfer to other stacked sheets before it gets a chance to dry.The actual gamut (color possibilities) of CMYK inks are actually more narrow than it would seem. In particular you can't produce truly beautiful oranges and greens, something thats somewhat evident by the colors of the inks themselves, e.g. when trying to produce a great orange you'd mix magenta and yellow, but due to the somewhat blue nature of the color magenta, it never comes out truly orange. As a result several alternate printing systems have been developed. For a while Pantone's (major manufacturer of press inks) Hexachrome system was somewhat popular, which directly added orange and green, creating a CMYKOG system. Unfortunately it wasn't ever sufficiently popular (largely due to press limitations and Pantone's patent protection) and is no longer in use.Lastly, what others have posted along with what I added here only barely touches the surface of subtractive and additive color. One primary reason is the fact that the human eye is actually pretty lousy at seeing a very large range of theoretically visible colors (stuff in the "visible light" spectrum, not down into infrared or up into ultraviolet). Another is that really no color model accurately reflects the possible colors that exist -- there's some seriously complex science involved. And finally, I brushed over the complexities of press ink and didn't touch stuff like under color removal, under color addition, gray component replacement, how halftoning dramatically affects what you can actually do, etc.Crazy stuff!</blockquote>

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