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Four colour printing

CMYK: Four colour printing Only four colours are needed to reproduce the millions of colours visible to the human eye when printing. Cyan Magenta Yellow BlacK Any colour can be reproduced using a combination of these colours. These four colours are usually refered to as CMYK. Before any picture is printed is has to be 'seperated' into these four colours. This is unsurprisingly called colour seperation.
	The centre image has been divided onto the four colours need to print in full colour. Click the image to see it close up.

Printed images are usually made up of millions of tiny dots of colour placed close to one another. You can see these if you look closely at a photo in a newspaper. When you stand back away from the image you can no longer see the individual, CMYK dots but millions of different colours. Colours can also be reproduced by overlapping the four colours as the inks are slightly transparent. Cyan put on top of yellow will appear green. Your colour printer at home with have four different colour inks in it's cartridge. Can you guess what they are? More information Why is a K used to represent black? Wouldn't B be better? When we talk about making a colour with light we only need 3 colours, RGB, Red, Green and Blue. These are the three colours used to make the colour pictures on your tv, if you look closely as the screen you will be able see the RGB dots on the screen. The initial 'B' is used here to refer to blue. It would be confusing if it also meant black.