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Color Considerations for Advertisers High quality color reproduction is a complicated matter, under the best of circumstances and in the most skilled hands. The advertisement you create on your computer monitor may look quite different in print. So we have prepared this simplified guide to help Natural Life advertisers design ads that look good and are easily readable. Color Registration: When you create an ad, any graphics or colored type must be in CMYK format (see below), except for black and white ads, which should be saved as gray-scale. However, all black type and line drawings must be 100% black so as not to take on color properties and lose clarity. Color Accuracy: CMYK, which is the color model we require, uses a mixture of four process colors to make other colors: Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents. It is a subtractive color process, based on light reflected from an object and passed through pigments or dyes that absorb certain wavelengths, allowing others to be reflected. In other words, it begins with white (as a white sheet of paper) and subtracts color. The cyan, magenta and yellow pigments serve as filters, subtracting varying degrees of red, green and blue from white light to produce a selective gamut of colors. In theory, a combination of cyan, magenta and yellow should produce black, but in reality, it will create a deep purple brown and the fourth color black in CMYK is needed to produce true black. In contrast, computer monitors emit light using a different color model called RGB, which stands for Red-Green-Blue. The RGB method of reproducing color is additive; it begins with black and adds these three primary colors of light in varying degrees. No red, green or blue means the absence of light, creating dark or black. Conversely, total coverage of each of the three colors gives white, as you get if mixing colored spotlights on a stage. One of the most difficult aspects of desktop publishing or graphic design is properly converting the RGB colors you see on your monitor into CMYK colors so that what gets printed looks the way you want it to. Since your monitor is creating color by shining light, and colors on a printed page are reflecting light, it is difficult to match colors and some are impossible to match. Computer monitors vary widely and most monitors are calibrated at the factory to optimize crispness of text, not color accuracy in printed documents. For instance, rich, saturated colors will often look duller in print than when viewed on a computer monitor. In addition, the same color settings may result in differently appearing colors from one monitor to the next. If you send us a color ad saved in RGB format, we will have to convert it to CMYK. When that conversion takes place, color shifts can occur and quality can be lost. So you should create your color ad in CMYK and send it to us in that format (taking into consideration the caution above about black type). If you create your ad using Photoshop, that program’s color settings menu allows you to convert a file to the monitor’s color space, so that what you view on your monitor is closer to what will print. This only affects the display, not the file. Photoshop assumes that the file’s true colour space is the one defined in the appropriate Setup dialog box. You may also want to calibrate your monitor (most professional graphic software programs allow this) to ensure that the CMYK settings are relevant to print production. Pantone colors (PMS) cannot be matched exactly using four-color process inks. Careful reading of software manuals will show you how to set your software and calibrate your monitor. If you are not comfortable doing this, either use basic colors and be sure to send us your file in CMYK, employ a graphic designer who is used to working in the print medium, or hire us to create your ad for you. |
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