Interesting Facts Behind Color Printing

Color printing is not a new process. It has been studied, experimented, and used by many different civilizations for more than 2000 years. In fact, until today we are continuously learning new things about colors and how they affect our lives.

As expected, most print jobs and materials today are created in color. Black and white printing is only used when necessary because colored materials grab attention more easily. This is especially true when producing advertising materials. A lot of business owners today don’t hesitate to spend substantial amount of money just to get their materials printed in color.     

The following are facts about color printing that you might want to take note of especially if you are hiring commercial printing services to produce your materials:

1. Full color or four color printing makes use of CMKY (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key or Black) to produce full color materials.
2. Full color printing is a subtractive process since putting colored inks on paper deducts brightness from paper.
3. The first book printed in color was produced from the printing press of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer.       
4. Halftoning or screening is used to produce thousands of colors through full color printing.
5. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are capable of creating different colors, but they cannot produce the color black.
6. Computer monitors displays images on RGB (Red, green, and blue) colors while printing presses makes use of the CMYK model. It’s best to convert RGB files to CMYK before printing to avoid color shifts.
7. Black in CMYK is called key because the printing plates of cyan, magenta, and yellow are keyed with that of the black toner’s key plate.