Understanding CMYK Color
| Cyan | + | Magenta | + | Yellow | + | blacK | = | CMYK |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
+ |  |
+ |  |
+ |  |
= |  |
CMYK is a subtractive color space.
White is the absence of all colors.
Black is the presence of all colors.
But as the above illustration indicates,
cyan, magenta and yellow mix to produce gray.
Black is added to darken things up.
The CMYK mode assigns 32 bits of data to each pixel.
A CMYK image may be thought of as four grayscale images.
One image represents cyan values,
one magenta, one yellow, one black.
The four images, or channels, combine to produce millions of colors.
CMYK Color Demo from Editor B on Vimeo.
Color printers use the CMYK model.
It's based on pigment, and how light reflects off of pigment.
The CMYK image at the top of this page may look funny because
this is not a printed page — It's a monitor.
Some Web browsers are not equipped to translate
four-channel CMYK images
into
three-channel RGB displays.
Some browsers try to force the four channels to fit,
like jamming a square peg into a triangular hole,
producing the funky image seen above.
Other browsers won't display the image at all!