Accurate Colour Settings
Understanding colour control in the digital medium can be quite baffling. There are so many variables involved. When moving between computers, operating systems, applications, monitors, printers & papers things can change dramatically. Then different operators also have different opinions of what is green, grey or otherwise. Here at Ken's we have put a lot of time & research into negating each of these problems in turn.
Some of these problems are simple to sort. With software in general it is often merely a matter of stating which colour profiles are to be used. We use AdobeRGB(1998). This is a standard RGB profile that is commonplace in the majority of software & digital cameras alike. Below we have a diagram showing how our colour settings are in Photoshop.
If you would like a copy of the file we use for samples click the link at the bottom of this paragraph (note 590KB file).
To calibrate our monitors to the Adobe RGB profile we use a Pantone ColorVision Spyder. This clever device zeros all the prsent monitor corrections, takes a reading of each colour, then makes it own corrections. Then it tells the computer monitor software the new calibration & how it relates to Adobe RGB. To simplify that, it brings all the monitors, (LCD & CRT) up to par. This way you can pretty much trust what you are looking at.
If you have an accurately calibrated monitor & you are using Adobe RGB as your embedded profile, there is no reason why you shouldn't get a perfect print out of our Pegasus LED II. As you can see these things dont have to be as troublesome, because we have the worst of it under control, you need only check those files out & race them off to us!
About Colour
Additive colors are created by mixing spectral light in varying combinations. The most common examples of this are television screens and computer monitors, which produce colored pixels by firing red, green, and blue electron guns at phosphors on the television or monitor screen. More precisely, additive color is produced by any combination of solid spectral colors that are optically mixed by being placed closely together, or by being presented in very rapid succession. Under these circumstances, two or more colors may be perceived as one color.
Subtractive colors are seen when pigments in an object absorb certain wavelengths of white light while reflecting the rest. We see examples of this all around us. Any colored object, whether natural or man-made, absorbs some wavelengths of light and reflects or transmits others; the wavelengths left in the reflected/transmitted light make up the color we see.
RGB Colour
Red, green, and blue are the primary stimuli for human color perception and are the primary additive colors.
The relationship between the colors can be seen in the illustration:
The secondary colors of RGB, cyan, magenta, and yellow, are formed by the mixture of two of the primaries and the exclusion of the third. Red and green combine to make yellow, green and blue make cyan, and blue and red make magenta. The combination of red, green, and blue in full intensity makes white. White light is created when all colors of the EM spectrum converge in full intensity.
The importance of RGB as a color model is that it relates very closely to the way we perceive color with the r g b receptors in our retinas. RGB is the basic color model used in television or any other medium that projects the color. It is the basic color model on computers and is used for Web graphics, but it cannot be used for print production.
CMY(K)
Cyan, magenta, and yellow correspond roughly to the primary colors in art production: red, blue, and yellow. In the illustration, you can see the CMY counterpart to the RGB model shown above.
Just as the primary colors of CMY are the secondary colors of RGB, the primary colors of RGB are the secondary colors of CMY. But as the illustrations show, the colors created by the subtractive model of CMY don't look exactly like the colors created in the additive model of RGB. Particularly, CMY cannot reproduce the brightness of RGB colors. In addition, the CMY gamut is much smaller than the RGB gamut.
Both models shown fall short of reproducing all the colors we can see. Furthermore, they differ to such an extent that there are many RGB colors that cannot be produced using CMY(K), and similarly, there are some CMY colors that cannot be produced using RGB.
These differences in gamut can create problems in the color production of computer-generated graphics and pages, and inconsistent color is a problem inherent in all computer-generated color output.
