The Age Old Battle - RGB vs. CMYK

Many of my customers that are not in the immediate area, request a .pdf file proof of their publication to speed up the turn around time on any particular job.  Pre-press departments are usually wary of sending .pdf file proofs to customers.  Why?  We have a lot of reasons, but color matching is the first reason that comes to mind.  

When a customer receives a .pdf file proof they almost always assume that their monitor is showing the colors that will print.  This is a completely false assumption.  How do I know it is a false assumption?  Well for one thing, open a .pdf file on your computer then print it out on your home or office printer.  Does the color that printed, exactly match what you are viewing on your monitor? Most likely the color is not the same.  Sometimes it will be fairly close, and sometimes it will be completely different.  Most people don’t notice the discrepancy between the colors on a monitor and the colors that are printed since the color on most of the items we print on our home or office printers isn’t the most important part of the document.  Color is often overlooked.  In press printing, color is one of the most important parts of a finished printed piece.  In my opinion color is the single most stressful part of press printing.  I have often hated the color “royal blue” for the simple fact that to me it is the most difficult color to achieve in CMYK press printing from a pre-press standpoint.  To illustrate this, below is a color spectrum for RGB and CMYK side by side.  RGB is the color spectrum that your monitor builds all the colors we see. 

It mixes Red, Green, and Blue light to create pink, yellow, cyan and every color in between. Black is achieved by using no light at all, and white is achieved by mixing 100% of all of the colors together. CMYK printing is completely different. In CMYK printing all colors are achieved using a mix of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks. Because most printing is on white paper, we don’t need an ink to achieve white, we simply print no ink on the areas that we intend to be white. Black can achieved using just the black ink or by a mix of all of the inks together. Now that you understand how colors are achieved in RGB vs CMYK, lets move onto the important things: The reason I hate royal blue. Royal blue can easily be achieved on a monitor which means most people see the pretty blue on their monitor and think it will exactly translate to a printer, however royal blue is not easily achieved in CMYK printing. If you look at the diagram for RGB printing, you will see one of the three main colors, Blue. This Blue is pretty close to a royal blue by my ideals of what royal blue is. In CMYK printing there is no “blue” ink, there is only Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks. This means that the royal blue you see on the RGB scale converts to a mix of cyan and magenta on the CMYK scale. This creates a color closer to indigo, which to most people appears purple. So when people choose the standard bright glowing blue that Microsoft Word, Publisher, MAC Pages and other programs offer right off the bat, they expect it to print the color they see, which will never happen! I have had so many issues with the color blue, that now when I see a Word, Publisher, or Mac Pages file where someone has chosen that bright blue, instead of keeping the color as the standard conversion, I usually change it to the following CMYK breakdown to achieve what I have found to be the least complained about mix of inks as close to royal blue as I can get it. Royal Blue: C=100% M=58% Y=0% B=25%. This color appears closer to a “teal” color on your monitor, but when printed on a press if you sweet-talk your pressman, they can usually get it pretty close to royal blue. I could talk for hours about the issues caused by Microsoft Word, Publisher, and Mac Pages, but let’s save that for another time!

What’s the problem with Publisher?

In the past two years since the recession has hit small businesses hard, I have seen an influx of files created in programs like Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Word and even MAC Pages.  Companies are trying to save  money they spent in the past on a graphic designer by having their staff create publications in the programs readily available at a low price.  There are many offset press printing companies that will not accept Publisher files for printing.  So what is the problem with Publisher?  In short, these programs were designed for home or digital printing.   There are 4 major issues with sending these files to an offset printer.

1.     Color: When you choose a color in Microsoft word or Publisher like Blue or Red they are a glowing representation of those two colors.  What you don’t realize is the blue that you have selected converts to a much darker blue (almost purple) in CMYK printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks mixed to create color on a printing press).  The red you have selected prints almost orange on a printing press.  Just about every color that you will choose in any of those programs (unless you know how to choose a CMYK color properly) will not print as you intend it to.  Call your offset printer if you want to find out about how to choose the proper CMYK color using the program you have.

2.     Fonts: Fonts are an issue no matter what program you create a file in, but since Word, and MAC Pages have no option for collecting the fonts used in the publication we will not guarantee that the fonts will print as you see them on your computer.  If we do not have the font you chose installed on our computer when opening the document, the Word and Mac pages programs automatically substitute a font without warning us.  This can make your final piece look like hieroglyphics!  We try our best to find the fonts you used, but it is always best when using programs outside of the professional design software to choose fonts that are common to most computers such as Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Garamond, etc.

3.     Images: When using publisher you have the option to link or embed images in your document.  Most people don’t know how to change these options.  What’s the Difference?  Linking means that the images are saved in a folder separate from the publisher file and the publisher file contains a link where the image is supposed to be.  It is almost like a link to an image on a web page.  This keeps the size of the publisher file down.  If you link the images you have to package the file properly for your printers otherwise your images will not print well.  If we receive a publisher file with linked images, but they don’t send us the actually images in a different file, publisher automatically changes those images to be an embedded low-resolution image.  An embedded image is exactly what it sounds like.  The image is literally embedded into the publisher file at the resolution you set it to.  This means that the publisher file can become extra large making it cumbersome to work with.

4.     Bleed:  Most home publishing software does not provide an easy way to include a bleed on a document. Don’t know what a bleed is?  Click here to read my previous instructions on what a bleed is and for basic instructions on how to include a bleed in these programs.

I don’t hold anything against companies that use these programs to create publications. In fact I welcome newcomers to the graphic design profession. My advice is to learn to use the programs correctly. Figure out how to include a proper bleed, learn what colors to choose, use common fonts and learn the difference between embedding images and linking to the images. A way to avoid having the issues I have listed above is to send a print ready .pdf file to your printer. What do I mean when I say “print ready .pdf”? Look for my next edition of Pre-Press Tips and Tricks next month and I will hopefully be able to walk you through creating a print ready .pdf file. Good luck and be Sheetwise!