The ability to reproduce text or an image in full colour was a huge development in printing technology. The most common method used today is known as four-colour process printing and employs three primary ink colours - cyan, magenta, and yellow - as well as black ink.
To carry out four-colour printing, the colours in the image to be printed must first be separated into red, green and blue components. Originally this was done photographing the image three times using different coloured filters, but these days can be achieved by using a digital scanner. The result is three grey-scale images each in representing the red, green and blue components of the picture.
Each image is then inverted, which produces the three colours mentioned above – the inversion of the colour red is cyan, while green becomes magenta, and blue produces yellow.
This sounds complicated, but when these three resulting colours are combined in the printing process, the result should be an accurate reproduction of the original image. In practice, limitations in the quality of ink pigments means that darker colours are often muddy and inaccurate. Black ink is therefore used to improve the shadow and contrast of the image.
The colour printing methods used today are very sophisticated, as this process is now combined with digital printing technology, making the reproduction of colour images seem deceptively simple.
To carry out four-colour printing, the colours in the image to be printed must first be separated into red, green and blue components. Originally this was done photographing the image three times using different coloured filters, but these days can be achieved by using a digital scanner. The result is three grey-scale images each in representing the red, green and blue components of the picture.
Each image is then inverted, which produces the three colours mentioned above – the inversion of the colour red is cyan, while green becomes magenta, and blue produces yellow.
This sounds complicated, but when these three resulting colours are combined in the printing process, the result should be an accurate reproduction of the original image. In practice, limitations in the quality of ink pigments means that darker colours are often muddy and inaccurate. Black ink is therefore used to improve the shadow and contrast of the image.
The colour printing methods used today are very sophisticated, as this process is now combined with digital printing technology, making the reproduction of colour images seem deceptively simple.