Printing in the office requires a printer that takes the needs of the whole office into account. The printer you choose may be one that uses CMYK printing, or it may use RGB printing. Here’s how these two techniques are different.
RGB on Screens
This acronym stands for the three primary colors that make up light. They are blue, green and red. When digital work is created in color, it uses RGB colors to create all of the colors used on the screen. The colors tend to be brighter and far more saturated than when they are on paper. When you combine these three primary colors of light, they create white light, making them the three parts of light that is used in the pixels of monitors, scanners, TVs and digital cameras. These three colors are used to make new colors in the exact opposite way as using the CMYK printing technique.
CMYK Printing
This acronym refers to these terms: Magenta, cyan, yellow and key. The key is just a term for this group of colors. The three colors mentioned, plus black, are used in CMYK printers to create all of the other colors when used together. These work together more like paints than like RGB lights. For instance, using more of these colors makes them darker, and using magenta and cyan together create blue. Printers mixing together blue and green creates the color cyan.
Paying Attention to Color
The biggest reason that you need to know the difference between these two ways of using color is so that you understand why some colors will look different when printed than they do on the screen. The colors when printed will often be darker than they work on the screen, and there are not as many shades of color on the printout as there were on the screen. The differences between light and ink will create some differences in the finished product, but those differences will be minimal. Every effort is made to make printed images look as close to their screen counterparts as possible, but there are those slight differences in brightness and the range of possible colors.
