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What is the difference between CMYK and RGB?

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black - the inks we mix together to produce your printed material.
RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue - the colours of light a computer screen mixes together to make colours on screen. In other words RGB is used for viewing colours on a computer screen, like this website.

All our presses, big and small, use cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks to transform your digital file to printed media. Please ensure your artwork is set up as CMYK. If you use RGB images or colours we will convert these to CMYK for you but the colour of your printed file may appear different when printed.

Avoid rich black text

Rich black is a CMYK mix. No registration is absolutely perfect; there is always a little shift or stretch. Make sure that all black text is set at 100% black. This means the text is only printed once with the black plate, eliminating registration problems.

Solid black areas of colour

With digital printing, you don’t need as much ink to achieve a good black solid. In fact, if you use too much ink your print will suffer in quality and may require lamination to protect the printed layer. If you want a rich black solid, use these values:
30% Cyan, 30% Magenta, 30% Yellow, 100% Black. This gives you an overall ink coverage of 190%

Grey Text

Grey ink is not used when printing in CMYK digitally. A pattern of dots or "screen" is used to achieve grey, e.g. not a solid colour. Small point sizes below 7pt or thin fonts might look only partially printed when coloured grey.

There are two ways to produce grey.

  1. CMYK - A light grey made from all 4 colours will appear more solid as there are more dots used but this can cause registration issues.
  2. Black Ink (K) - A light grey made from black ink will not have registration issues but the dots will be more visible as there is only one colour used.

Using fonts at small sizes

Be careful when using small font sizes. We don’t recommend smaller than 7pt for small format work up to A3 and 11pt for large format above A3. Remember, the smaller the text the harder it is to keep in register. If you have to use small text we recommend you use 100% black to eliminate any registration problems.