(aka: Color lesson 101)
Or in other words... red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. We all learned the colors of the rainbow when we were little, and I believe it is the last color lesson many of you received. I was reminded of this as I witnessed a double rainbow on December 27 and started discussing colors with my 14-year-old daughter. ROYGBIV. Amazing what nature can create. And, just as impressive is what science and technology (and Pantone) has done with the colors we use daily. Let’s start with what most of you all know best — RGB (red, green, blue). RGB is defined by Wikipedia as the “additive color model in which red, green, and blue light is added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors.” When you take a photograph with your digital camera, phone or whatever handheld device you possess, you are taking an image using the RGB format. This format is usually saved as a JPG and can be put into Word or PowerPoint documents or for online usage. Amazing, right? Well, for those of us in the design world it gets better and sometimes more complicated when we add CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). The print world combines these four colors using various percentages to create a wide range of color. Most TIFF files are CMYK, and what we use to send to “print” — also known as four-color printing — the four colors being cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Amazing again, right? Now, as you can imagine crossing over from RGB to CMYK will usually never give you the same exact color. Our job is to do our best to adjust numbers and colors so that the colors you see in a corporate PowerPoint presentation are close to the colors of the printed corporate brochure sitting in front of your audience. It’s not a perfect science, but then again... what could be more perfect than a rainbow?
Image above shows our HDN red broken down into RGB and CMYK values.
