From the course: Illustrator: Coloring Artwork

Which color mode, CMYK or RGB? - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator: Coloring Artwork

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Which color mode, CMYK or RGB?

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- [Instructor] We need to start off by talking a little bit about color models or color modes because it's the first color decision that you will encounter when creating a new document in Illustrator. An Illustrator document has to be either in the RGB color mode or the CMYK color mode. The RGB color is what we call additive colors, and the CMYK color mode is what we call subtractive. Linked content in an Illustrator document can be in a different color mode. So, for example, you could have a CMYK document with linked RGB content. Any colors created or copied to an Illustrator document will take on the color mode of the document. CMYK describes the colors of inks used for all types of color printing. RGB describes the color of light. It's a pretty common belief or maybe even misbelief that CMYK means print and RGB means web or UI design. Even Illustrator's new document templates are setup this way. I'm going to go to the new document window with a Command + N, or that would be a Control + N if you're on a Windows machine, and then I'll select web up here, which will give us new document web templates. If we look down here under the advanced options, sometimes this is closed, so if you don't see that you can click here to open it, we'll see that the color mode of this template is RGB. All of the templates in the web section are RGB documents. If we switch to the print templates then we're going to get a document that's created in the CMYK color mode, but this isn't a hard and fast rule. We could change to the RGB color mode by clicking here. I'll go ahead and close out of that without it creating a new document. CMYK is a smaller color space than RGB meaning that fewer colors can be created with CMYK, but many of today's ink jet printers can achieve an expanded color space with extra inks like light cyan, magenta, and yellow, or even hexachrome colors like greens and oranges. In my experience the RGB color mode is better than the CMYK color mode for most inkjet print devices. Color mode doesn't really impact the way that we use Illustrator's tools to color though. So for that reason I'm not going to elaborate any further on the topic of RGB versus CMYK. For a more in depth study of RGB versus CMYK, I highly recommend Claudia McCue's video on understanding color space from her course on Learning Print Production.

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