Monitors emit light, inked paper absorbs or reflects specific wavelengths. Cyan, magenta and yellow pigments serve as filters, subtracting varying degrees of red, green and blue from white light to produce a selective gamut of spectral colors. Like monitors, printing inks also produce a color gamut that is only a subset of the visible spectrum, although the range is not the same for both. Consequently, the same art displayed on a computer monitor may not match to that printed in a publication. Also, because printing processes such as offset lithography use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) inks, digital art must be converted to CMYK color for print.
CMYK works in a subtractive manor, where to more colours you add the Darker the colour will eventually become, RGB works in a additive manor where the more colours you add the lighter colour you will eventually end up with:
RGB is a far greater range of colours available on screen, but the problem is a lot of these colours aren't able to be printed in CMYK as it lacks a large part of the colour spectrum.
It is always a good idea to check that the colours you have selected on screen is able to print out within the CMYK range as if left the software will automatically pick a colour close to the RGB range and replace it, leaving you with a completely different printed colour.
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