CMYK colours are shown wrong
macOs Big Sur 11.3.1
adobe illustrator 25.3.1 (desktop)
I've been working on a CMYK document and the colours don't look like the colours from CMYK palette. How can I fix this?
Kamilla Kurmanova
shared this idea
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Not exactly.
A CMYK document will always display only the colors that your current CMYK profile allows — true.There are two general methods to create artworks to be printed.
1. Work directly in a CMYK mode. The colors are actually get stored as CMYK values, and can’t be anything but CMYK (unless you use use Spot colors, which are basically additional inks).
2. Work in RGB mode, get a wider range of colors and check how they fit into CMYK using View > Proof Colors. The colors are stored as RGB.The latter way works if you want to have one artwork to be used both for screen and print media.
The former one makes sense if you need more precise controls over inks. -
Thanks a lot for this explanation, Egor. So there is no way to prepare artworks for printing in the colours that CMYK doesn't have?
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Here is how it works.
RGB color space is generally wider than CMYK. There are colors that can be displayed by an average monitor, but can’t be printed (the opposite can be true also, but it depends on specific outputs).The color you see in the RGB document is in fact an RGB color, with the value RGB 0-47-187.
And if you grab and copy the object it and paste in a CMYK document, Ai would have to squeeze it into CMYK values — and according to your chosen profile the CLOSEST color would be CMYK 95-85-0-0 — and this is what Ai shows you in Color picker.If you do the opposite operation, grab an object filled with 95-85-0-0 from the CMYK doc and paste it into RGB one — the color would look the same, because RGB has no problem with displaying this muted blue.
When you are in RGB doc, CMYK values are NOT primary, but a closest match.
Same goes for a CMYK doc — RGB values would be a conversion result.Here is how it looks at my machine (see the attached images). I use different profile, that explains different values, but you get the idea.
This is an RGB doc, which can display both vibrant and muted blues.
Color Picker displays the same CMYK values for both, but the RGB values are obviously different — because RGB is the leading values here, while CMYK is an approxiamtion.Now watch the animation.
As soon as I set the cursor in any fields for CMYK and change a value (I am just tapping an arrow), THESE fields become leading ones, and the displayed color changes to reflect the change.Does it make any sense?
(Edited by admin) -
Sorry I misled you, Egor. Yes, the same CMYK values from the Color Picker give different looking colours on canvas for RGB and CMYK modes.
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The images you show now don’t actually math the claim you made in the OP, at least for me... Sorry, I must have gotten it wrong.
When you said 'colours from CMYK palette' — I thought you meant Swatches panel, and you meant that colors of the swatches displayed in the panel don’t much the applied colors on canvas! But it’s not the case here.So I presume now you mean that the same CMYK values form the Color Picker give different looking colors on canvas, when used in documents with different color modes (since on is in RGB, and another one in CMYK). Do I get it right now?
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Sure. The result is the same with enabled Proof Colors setting or disabled. In the beginning it was disabled.
I attached the screenshots for Edit > Assign Profile and Edit > Color Settings.
Also I've attached two files to show color difference in RGB and CMYK Documents. You can see there that CMYK code is the same in both files.
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Strange.
Can you share some screenshots of it?
Let’s start with basic checks: do you have View > Proof Colors disabled?
What settings do you have in Edit > Color Settings?
What about Edit > Assign Profile, what does it show?
Does it happen in one document only or you can reproduce it in a new one?
