Colors can also change in a game of visual “telephone” as images move from one device and monitor to another and land in front of different artists and designers along the way. The original and the final products may be off by an entire shade if too many links are in your design chain. Colors will look different based on not only the hardware but also the many various settings such as brightness and contrast.

When the time finally comes to take your project to a printer, the type of technology and materials they have available—like inks and media—add more variables to how your image might turn out. Laminates on a medium, the ink types and even something seemingly harmless like a medium’s texture will have some perceivable effects on how colors end up appearing on a finished product.

The vast array of variables at play can be almost frightening. There’s no need for that, however, as our experts at SpeedPro are here to ensure you get the proper colors translated over to your completed project.

There are two major factors that will help us in our color matching process: Color profiles and Pantones.

Color Profiles

Design and art files created digitally usually are set up with one of two primary color profiles: RGB, which stands for Red/Green/Blue, or CMYK, which stands for Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black. Despite this, not every single color that we can see in reality can be perfectly reproduced with either system and colors will, therefore, vary subtly as images move from monitor to printed material. 

The RGB profile is based on the optical colors of light and is the color definition that is utilized by digital devices like cameras and monitors that ultimately gives us the images we see through those devices. 

CMYK, on the other hand, is the color profile for pigments–the colors reflected by materials in real life. These are the four colors used in “4-color printing” that many fans of graphic design will easily recognize from the colorful pages of comic books from the 1930’s on.

Mixing RGB light creates white light while mixing CMYK pigments creates black. Because of this, a designer is able to make colors on a screen using the RGB profile that can be difficult to reproduce accurately by a CMYK printing process. Despite that, it is better to design in RGB because you can create the best possible version of your design. This is why it’s best to design from the start using the CMYK color profile. However, if you bring us an RGB file, our engineers will take your digital files through printer-specific programs to convert them into CMYK.