How to Prep Your Own Artwork for CAD-PRINTZ Printing
RGB Vs. CMYK Color Mode:
We make it easy for our customers by providing all the artwork you could ever imagine with Easy Prints® layouts and clipart, which the selection continues to grow each year. However, sometimes your customers provide their own artwork or maybe you have come up with some very nice artwork yourself. In these cases, one of the most common questions that re-occur has to do with the color mode of the artwork files. The color mode of your artwork file is basically the colors that your artwork is rendered in its end use. To determine which color mode you want, you must know your end use for the artwork. There are various color modes, while RGB and CMYK are the most common.
RGB (standing for Red, Green, Blue) is a color mode used by computer monitors, televisions, and any sort of electronic screen. All of the colors you see on the screen are actually made up of various combinations of tiny red, green and blue “boxes” known as pixels. This is also the color mode used by all internet graphics. If you are making any artwork for the web or any other project that will be viewed on a monitor, you would want to use RGB as the color mode.
However, RGB is not a color mode meant for printing. CMYK (standing for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (Black)) is the other main color mode which is meant for printing. By combining different percentages of the ink colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, a wide variety of other colors are created. This is the method used by your ink jet printer at home all the way to commercial printing presses. CMYK is also known as “full color”, “4-color” or “process color” printing. We use CMYK as the color mode to print all of our CAD-PRINTZ™. This includes all of the digital transfers, wall graphics, banners, stickers and window clings. If you try to print artwork that is RGB using CMYK, the colors will not be consistent and will most likely be very different from how they appear on your computer screen. Therefore, if you are sending us artwork for any CAD-PRINTZ™ product, we need the color mode in CMYK.
Changing the color mode of your artwork file depends on the computer application you are using. Please check your users guide for your particular application that you are using for details.
RGB and CMYK Color Model