From the course: Illustrator for the In-House Designer

Print color considerations - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator for the In-House Designer

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Print color considerations

- [Instructor] Now you might not be familiar with the system of process printing, or four color printing as it's often known, and don't worry too much about that because we are going to look into that in a couple of chapters' time. But essentially what you do need to know is that pretty much all print, apart from special processes, takes place with four colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. And in this document I have a really lovely black square made in CMYK. Now if I click on that and then open the color panel here I've got the options showing that allow me to see the composition of that color. And you can see here that black is at 100% and that's exactly what I would like. But if I switch here to this RGB document, look at the composition of black here. And it's got an awful lot of cyan in it, an awful lot of magenta, an awful lot of yellow, and quite a lot of black in there. If you imagine, that's gonna take quite a lot of ink into the paper and make it very, very wet indeed. So part of the challenge that you have, especially if you're working between print and digital, is knowing how to start a document. The best thing to do, is when you're creating a new document, is choose an appropriate profile because that pretty much sorts that out for you and creates you a CMYK document with the right raster effects and so on, and an RGB document similarly. In Photoshop it doesn't really matter what you're doing because it will just evaluate all of the different pixel colors. But in Illustrator, because you're actually assigning values, and having those mapped out to a process it does, so do be careful when you're starting a document and choose the right type for the end intent as in print.

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