Why are printed colours so different looking than the colors on my screen?

1 reply [Last post]
Jason Westbridge
User offline. Last seen 39 weeks 23 hours ago. Offline
Joined: 11/06/2009

I often find that the colour of the final printed product is different than the colour that I had originally seen while designing on screen. Why is that?

James Nowell
User offline. Last seen 6 weeks 5 days ago. Offline
Joined: 11/06/2009

It is often thought that what you see on screen will be what you see coming off the press. However this sometimes is not the case. Moniters use RGB (Red, Green & Blue) which usually supports a wider spectrum of colours. Printers use the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) colour model, which can reproduce most colours in the RGB model - but not all. Depending on equipment CMYK can usually match around 85-90% of the colours in the RGB model.

Drupal 6 Appliance - Powered by TurnKey Linux