Most computers, scanners, digital cameras and monitors generate images using combination of three colours: Red, Green and Blue, often referred to RGB. Our lithographic and digital printing presses use four different colours to print these images.
• Cyan (light blue),
• Magenta (Hot Pink)
• Yellow
• Black
These are known as CMYK or Process Colour. At some stage of production, RGB images must be converted to CMYK. Conversionsare best done in design software such as Photoshop and it is important that you do this before sending finished artwork to Minerva. If you are unable to do this then our software will apply a standard profile RGB to CMYK conversion, which may cause the colours to
look washed out. Printers often use Pantone Spot colours when printing work. Spot colours are mixed like paint and printed one at a time. Printing in more than one Pantone Spot colour is quite costly. We can colour match if required but in general, converting to CMYK is acceptable and still has the desired effect. If you would like for Minerva to print in Process colour, please ensure that all Pantone
Spot colours are converted to their CMYK equivalent before your file is sent to us. If you do not convert spot colours to process, then an extra separation printing plate may be produced when we process your job. This means objects may not appear on your printed job and may result in you incurring unnecessary costs. You can check your document by printing ‘separations’ on your desktop printer – see the help file that came with your application for more details. If anything other than cyan, magenta, yellow and black separations prints, then your file has unwanted colours that you need to convert. This is also a good way of checking knockout / overprinting settings. Some RGB and Spot colours do not have a direct CMYK equivalent – the technical term for this is ‘out of gamut’. If you have chosen a colour that is out of gamut, your software will choose the closest equivalent CMYK colour, which may be very different from the colour you intended. This is something that everyone has to put up with, so for best results, stick with colours from standard colour charts.