Understanding Colour Modes

Con­fused by CMYK, RGB, and the like? Got a plethora of logo formats and no idea which to use? Read on for some quick tips about how to get the most out of your colour.

Black and white: for use in fax machines and news­pa­pers and other print mediums that don’t use colour. The black and white ver­sion con­tains no shades of gray for max­imum legib­ility in any print scen­ario. “Black and white” is a bit of a mis­nomer — all that will be printed in this case is 100% black ink.

CMYK: for use in any pro­cess colour print job. In most cases, unless it’s an extremely large print run, your printer will be doing a pro­cess (CMYK) job and will require this ver­sion of the file. Col­ours are slightly less sat­ur­ated than their RGB coun­ter­parts, but have been adjusted to main­tain as much con­sist­ency as pos­sible. Use this file in your home printer and to send to a print shop. (Tip: before run­ning a full job at the print shop, ask for a proof. Dif­ferent printers, like dif­ferent mon­itors, output col­ours dif­fer­enly. You want to be sure the col­ours are to your liking before you print 10,000 busi­ness cards.)

RGB: for use in web­sites, emails, present­a­tions, and any­where else the logo is to be viewed primarily on-screen. You can print an RGB file, but you’ll find there will be a greater dis­parity between what you see on-screen and what your printer spits out. Keep in mind that dif­ferent mon­itors dis­play col­ours dif­fer­ently — these files have been pre­pared on a colour-calibrated machine in order to max­imize con­sist­ency across dif­ferent machines, but there’s no way to guar­antee how someone else will see a colour.

Pantone: for use in large print jobs using Pantone inks. Pantone inks are spe­cific col­ours pro­duced by Pantone and pur­chased by a print shop. Unless pro­cess (CMYK) jobs which mix four dif­ferent col­ours of ink in order to repro­duce any range of col­ours, Pantone jobs are run with very spe­cific ink col­ours. This means that there is an addi­tional charge for every extra colour used in the print job (black is con­sidered a colour), but you can guar­antee that every time your logo is printed, it will appear with the exact same colour scheme (bar­ring some vari­ation caused by the print stock). Pantone col­ours are still used by large cor­por­a­tions but are falling out of favour for small print runs due to their increased cost.

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