Colours

Your scanner, digital camera and monitor display and create images using combinations of just three colours: Red, Green and Blue (RGB). Printing presses like us use four different colours to print these images.  They are Cyan (light blue), Magenta (pinky red), Yellow and BlacK (CMYK), also known as Colour Process). At some stage of production, RGB images must be converted to CMYK. Conversions from RGB to CMYK are best done in image editing softwares like Photoshop or Illustrator and you should do this before sending your file to us. If you don’t perform the conversion yourself, when we print your file, our process will apply a standard profile RGB to CMYK conversion meaning that colours may look washed out. Traditional printers often use Pantone® Spot colours when printing work. Spot colours are mixed like paint and printed one at a time.

As we use Process Colour, all Pantone® Spot colours must be converted to their CMYK equivalent before your file is sent to us. If you don’t convert spot colours to process, then an extra separation printing plate may be produced when we process your job. This means objects may not appear on your printed job and may result in you incurring unnecessary costs. You can check your document by printing ‘separations’ on your desktop printer.(See the help file that came with your application for more details) If anything other than a cyan, magenta, yellow and black separation prints, then you’ve got unwanted colours that you need to convert. This is also a good way of checking knockout/overprinting settings.

Some RGB and Spot colours do not have a direct CMYK equivalent.  The technical term for this is “out of gamut”. If you have chosen a colour that is out of gamut, your software will choose the closest equivalent CMYK colour, which may be very different from the colour you intended. This is something that everyone has to put up with, so for best results, stick with colours from our colour chart.