Two ways of making colour
RGB (red, green, blue) is how screens make colour: they add light. Your monitor, your phone and your camera all think in RGB.
CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) is how printers make colour: they lay down ink, which absorbs light. It is the language of print.
No device sees every colour
Every device has its own colour space, the range of colours it can show or print. Your monitor has one, your office printer another, our printers another still. Each is only a slice of all the colours the human eye can see.
Those slices don't match. Some bright colours you see on screen simply cannot be printed with ink. And two different monitors, or two different printers, never show exactly the same colour.
So will my colours match?
Honestly: never perfectly. That is physics, not a lack of care. What you can expect from a serious printer is a difference that is small, predictable and consistent over time.
At Italiana Bandiere our printing systems are calibrated, certified and checked constantly. When your file arrives in CMYK, we map its colours into our printer's colour space, so the whole range of your artwork lands proportionally where it should. Customers are often surprised by how bright and faithful the result is.
Three tips for your file
- Work in CMYK. It gives the best chance that what you designed is what we can print.
- Check every element. A CMYK document can still hide RGB pictures inside it, especially in PDFs. Convert them too.
- Embed a colour profile. If you want to be precise, attach a standard CMYK profile to your document, such as FOGRA39.
Ready to print? Start from our maßgeschneiderte Produkte.
