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The CMYK color model is based on the CMY color model, which omits the black ink. However, the imperfect black generated by mixing commercially practical cyan, magenta, and yellow inks is unsatisfactory, so four-color printing uses black ink in addition to the subtractive primaries. Common reasons for using black ink include: [2]
The most noticeable result of using light cyan and light magenta inks is the removal of a distinct and harsh halftone or dither dot appearance that appears in prints that use light shades of cyan or magenta on the pure CMYK ink configuration. Usually when printing a dark color the printer will saturate the area with colored ink dots, but will ...
Magenta is the complement of green, and yellow the complement of blue. Combinations of different amounts of the three inks can produce a wide range of colors with good saturation. In inkjet color printing and typical mass production photomechanical printing processes, a black ink K (Key) component is included, resulting in the CMYK color model ...
CMYK is used in the printing process, because it describes what kinds of inks are needed to be applied so the light reflected from the substrate and through the inks produces a given color. One starts with a white substrate (canvas, page, etc.), and uses ink to subtract color from white to create an image.
Often a fourth ink, black, is added to improve reproduction of some dark colors. This is called the "CMY" or "CMYK" color space. The cyan ink absorbs red light but transmits green and blue, the magenta ink absorbs green light but transmits red and blue, and the yellow ink absorbs blue light but transmits red and green.
This printing technique is referred to as CMYK (the "K" stands for key, a traditional word for the black printing plate). Today's digital printing methods do not have the restriction of a single color space that traditional CMYK processes do. Many presses can print from files that were ripped with images using either RGB or CMYK modes.
A value of zero still produces black, and full lightness still produces white. The midpoint value results in the "middle" shade of gray, with an RGB value of (128,128,128). Saturation, or the lack of it, produces tones of the reference hue that converge on the zero-saturation shade of gray, which is determined by the lightness.
The CMYK model adds a black primary to improve the darkness of blacks, where the CMY model can only mix to dark gray or only achieves black inefficiently, i.e. by using lots of the primary pigments. In the CMY model, an equal mixture of cyan and magenta is blue , an equal mixture of magenta and yellow is red and an equal mixture of yellow and ...