All about color and printing

When I ask my kids to tell me the colors, they start with the primary colors of red, blue and yellow; then add the secondary colors of orange, purple and brown. An adult may be able to name up to 100 colors when they include teal, lavender, magenta, etc. However, in real life there are millions of variations all visible with the naked eye.
Just look at a green grass or a plant. Many different shades of green help define its appearance. Ask a group of adults to define the color purple and almost everyone will be thinking of a different shade be that violet, lavender, lilac or even mauve.

What you can see represented on your computer monitor is limited by both the hardware and the RGB color model used by your graphics card to display digital graphics. Computer printers and electrical devices for displaying color have practical limitations that prevent them from making all of the visible colors. The colors that they can collectively create are called the color gamut.

Physical printing can be different. Many digital printers and traditional "four-color" printing presses use the CMYK model. In the CMYK model, by using cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks or paints, you can mix nearly any color.

In theory, you can mix any reflective color by mixing a combination of cyan, magenta and yellow. In the real world, however, the inks that printers use are not perfect. This becomes most obvious when you mix all three to make black. The color that results is muddy brown, due to impurities in the inks. That is why printers use black ink to get the best results.

When preparing a color image for printing, the tradiional prepress operator makes four separation plates. Each plate is for one of the four colors of ink in the CMYK model (also referred to as “four-color” printing). When all four plates are aligned properly so that they can be printed on top of each other, the inks will combine to simulate the proper colors.

The PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® is a solid color communication system based on the visual matching of individual, pre-mixed colors. This is a series of books with thousands of precisely printed colors alongside printers' formulas for mixing those colors.

The PANTONE PROCESS COLOUR SYSTEM is used by artists and commercial printers to select, specify and match more than 3,000 colours very precisely. Many logos are created with specific PANTONE Colors that can be very closely reproduced. By using PANTONE Colors, designers can be confident that their output will match their expectations.