Specifying Colors
Telling the Printer What Color to Print
Choosing the most pleasing or effective color combinations is only part of the equation in working with color. You must also be able to specify the colors you want. For printing there are a number of ways to specify color and it can vary depending on the number of colors used and how you use them. We'll just go through a few of the possibilities.
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- Tints of a Single Color You can achieve a large variety of effects using a single color (1/C) by specifying that the color be screened (tints). These tints are percentages of the solid color (100%) as depicted below.
- Two or More Colors Combine solids and screened tints of two or more colors (2/C, 3/C, 4/C etc.). In the example, below, the colors are all combinations of a single color plus black (K) (top three are cyan, bottom three are magenta). (for printing purposes black is a color) They are also percentages.
- PMS Colors To match a color exactly (or as near as printing can get) you can use a system such as the Pantone Matching System. There are others as well. Color mixes are numbered for easy reference. Your graphics program may have color palettes named for some of the more popular color-matching systems. These allow you to choose colors for your design that correspond to the color-matching system your printer uses.
- CMYK In four-color process printing, to reproduce full-color continuous-tone color, we use four specific colors. These process colors are cyan (C), yellow (Y), magenta (M) (the SUBTRACTIVE colors from our color wheel), and black (K). The perception of millions of colors is achieved not by mixing these colors of ink but by printing thousands of tiny dots of each color in different sizes and patterns. The viewers eye "mixes" the colors and sees more than the four colors of CMYK (or sometimes, CYMK).
- Color Separations In four-color process printing, rather than specifying specific colors, you create separations [def.] — a different copy of your artwork for each of the four colors. Each copy is printed one on top of the other to create the optical effect of full-color.
Obviously this is only a quick overview. Hundreds of books and articles have been written about the process of specifying and printing in color.
Specifying Web Colors
In many ways specifying color for the Web is actually much simpler than printing in color. Just as four-color process printing relies on how our eyes interpret dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black in varying patterns, our computer screen relies on how our eyes interpret dots of red, green, and blue.
Color on the Web is specified in terms of the amount of red, green, and blue in the color. Black is the presence of 100% of all three. White is the absence of all three.
In our graphics program these amounts of red, green, and blue are specified with numbers for 0-255 (255 being the pure 100% value of the color).
255 RED 255 GREEN 0 BLUE 
In order for your computer to understand these numbers we translate them into 6 digit hexidecimal numbers or triplets.
255 RED 255 GREEN 0 BLUE becomes FFFF00. The first pair (FF) is the Red, The second pair (FF) is the Green, and 00 is the Blue. FF is the hexidecimal equivalent of 255 and 00 is the hexidecimal equivalent of 0.
It would appear that there are 256 possible color combinations that you can see on your computer monitor.
Simple enough, until we start talking about browser safe colors and cross-platform color appearance. The truth is, different browsers interpret colors slightly differently and the same color will not appear the same on all computer screens. It's very much like the way a printed color looks different on different types of paper.
In creating color graphics or specifying colors for backgrounds and text for display on the Web there are some things you can do that will help ensure that your colors will look acceptable to the majority of viewers. See our extensive collection of links to color selection, color on the Web, and other color topics.
