What is CMYK Printing?

When CMY “primaries” are combined at full strength, the resulting “secondary” mixtures are red, green and blue. Mixing all three gives an imperfect black.

What is CMYK?

The CMYK colour model (process colour, four colour) is a subtractive colour model, used in colour printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some colour printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Though it varies by print house, press operator, press manufacturer, and press run, ink is typically applied in the order of the abbreviation.

The “K” in CMYK stands for key because in four-colour printing, cyan, magenta and yellow printing plates are carefully keyed, or aligned, with the key of the black key plate. Some sources suggest that the “K” in CMYK comes from the last letter in “black” and was chosen because B already means blue. Some sources claim this explanation, although useful as a mnemonic, is incorrect, that K comes only from “Key” because black is often used as outline and printed first.

The CMYK model works by partially or entirely masking colors on a lighter, usually white, background. The ink reduces the light that would otherwise be reflected. Such a model is called subtractive because inks “subtract” brightness from white.

In additive color models such as RGB, white is the “additive” combination of all primary coloured lights, while black is the absence of light. In the CMYK model, it is the opposite: white is the natural coluor of the paper or other background, while black results from a full combination of coloured inks. To save cost on ink, and to produce deeper black tones, unsaturated and dark colours are produced by using black ink instead of the combination of cyan, magenta and yellow.

This diagram shows three examples of color halftoning with CMYK separations, as well as the combined halftone pattern and how the human eye would observe the combined halftone pattern from a sufficient distance.

What is Halftoning?

With CMYK printing, halftoning (also called screening) allows for less than full saturation of the primary colors; tiny dots of each primary color are printed in a pattern small enough that human beings perceive a solid color. Magenta printed with a 20% halftone, for example, produces a pink color, because the eye perceives the tiny magenta dots on the large white paper as lighter and less saturated than the color of pure magenta ink.

Without halftoning, the three primary process colors could be printed only as solid blocks of color, and therefore could produce only seven colors: the three primaries themselves, plus three secondary colors produced by layering two of the primaries: cyan and yellow produce green, cyan and magenta produce blue, yellow and magenta produce red (these subtractive secondary colors correspond roughly to the additive primary colors) plus layering all three of them resulting in black. With halftoning, a full continuous range of colors can be produced.