You’ve carefully selected your brand colors, designed your logo, and built your website, and now you need some flyers. But wait — that glowing chartreuse from your palette looks more like a dusty lime on paper, even though you’re sure you used the exact same color!
Have you ever printed an image or document off of the internet only to find that the colors in ink look totally different from what’s on your screen? Congratulations! You just witnessed the difference between RGB and CMYK color modes in action.
“Why does color need modes?” you may ask. The difference is directly related to how colors are generated and perceived by the eye in situations, namely, on a digital screen versus three-dimensional objects in the real world.
Electronic device screens function within the RGB color mode. An acronym for “red, green, blue”, the full range of color you see on any digital screen is generated by millions of lights in varying amounts of these three basic colors (i.e. pixels). RGB is referred to as an additive color mode, because the absence of any colors in the light spectrum creates black, or total darkness. RGB color codes refer to the incremental amounts of red, green, and blue between 0 and 255, with 0 equaling “off,” and 255, full brightness. As each number increases, the sum total of the color produced gets closer to white. All of the shades and variations between are created by combinations or levels of red, green, and blue light wavelengths.
On the flip side, CMYK is known as a subtractive color mode. If you ever dabbled in fingerpaints as a kid, you will know that mixing all of the colors together usually results in a dingy, dark brown mess. CMYK refers to cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (also known as black), and you’ll often see these on your printer utilities settings and ink packaging. CMYK color codes are usually described in percentages, which correlates to the density of ink applied to a surface (with 0% equaling no ink, and 100% being full saturation).
In CMYK, the absence of colors equals white, while 100% presence of all colors creates total black. When light hits an object, some of the light is absorbed into the surface, while the rest is reflected back into the atmosphere. The reflected light is what our eyes perceive as color. The higher the density of color used, the more light is absorbed into the surface, resulting in a progressively darker appearance.
In RGB, we’re essentially seeing the purest possible version of the light spectrum as generated by a light source (that is, an electronic device). The range of colors that the human eye can perceive within the RGB color space is notably wider than what CMYK can produce. This is why some colors (especially cyan) never look quite as vibrant coming out of your printer as they do on your computer screen.
In branding, you always want to make sure that your brand is easily recognizable in any environment, whether that be your company website, truck wraps, business cards, or apparel. This is why it is always recommended to test your brand’s color palette in both CMYK and RGB usages and adjust your individual colors as necessary for as much consistency as possible across all applications.
Color matching is an art form in and of itself. Luckily, the team at Keybridge Web is experienced in all areas of brand design in addition to custom web development.
