Most people who may have dabbled with Adobe Photoshop may have encountered RGB and CMYK before. These two have been integral with graphics design for so long, most people don’t realize their significance to what may come out as a finished product. The development of these different color gamuts paved the way to different techniques in perfecting graphics design and printing techniques.
As RGB is red, green, and blue, while CMYK is cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, each of these colors is in a separate channel. This affects the amount of information there is in a single file — if a file in RGB is 30MB, a file in CMYK will be 40MB. Having these different color gamuts is necessary for the different scenarios where each is needed.
With both of these modes, the differences can be quite confusing as to what a person should use for everyday graphics work. The following factors can be considered to make this choice a bit easier.
- Most images are originally made in RGB.
- All scanners work in RGB. If ever CMYK is an option in a scanner, that is from conversion.
- All digital images are made in RGB.
- Even with CMYK inks, inkjet printers work in RGB. They merely convert files into CMYK for printing. If it is to print a CMYK file, it will be converted to RGB, then to CMYK again.
- Despite having less channels, RGB has a wider range of colours than CMYK.
- RGB colours are not dependent on the performance of any device, such as a monitor or printer as it is displayed in digital numbers.
- RGB has one less channel than CMYK, which makes it require less memory.
- The finished product in CMYK depends on the the printing process itself.
- There is a large variety of CMYK colour spaces. Until the details about the printing process are known to the user, CMYK colors are more about the ink than what is seen on the screen, so it won’t be as accurate until it is proof-matched.
With these these things considered, it is much more convenient to work with RGB than CMYK. However, this is also dependent upon the designer and his/her desired results. All things considered, each mode has its corresponding use.
In the acronym CMYK, K stands for Black. This strange use of the letter K comes from how German printers described the color. They considered black as “kompensation” as it corrects inadequacies of cyan, magenta, and yellow. Black is necessary to deepen the tone of what is printed out, making the colors more distiguishable. While the German for yellow is gelb, that would be confused with green, or grun, in RGB. In the same manner, B isn’t used since it can be confused for blue in RGB.

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