Colors: RGB vs CMYK — How Your Artwork Will Look When Printed
Most digital artwork is created in RGB. We print in CMYK. Here is what that means for your design, and why your printed freshener may look slightly different from what you see on your screen.
Colors are created differently on screens vs print
Your monitor, phone, and tablet mostly use RGB (Red, Green, Blue) — a system that creates color using light. Because light can produce extremely vivid and saturated tones, screens can display a much wider range of colors than any printer can physically reproduce.
We print using CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) — a system that builds color from physical ink layers on paper. The range of colors CMYK can produce is narrower than RGB, which means some colors that look bright and vivid on screen will print in a slightly more muted tone.
How the conversion affects your artwork
When your RGB file goes to print, it is automatically converted to CMYK. For most colors this is seamless, but some shades shift more noticeably than others.