Lightning Labels Blog

What Color is That?

Adam Dewitz, the managing editor over at the PrintCEO blog had an interesting post earlier this week. He reported on research done by Dolores Labs where they showed thousands of random color samples to people and asked them to describe the color they saw. They then mapped these colors on to a color wheel that you see above. 

This research is most interesting when viewed through the little application they created. Here you can really get an insight into the different ways people describe color. For example, type in a color such as "turquoise" and look at all the different colors you get back. There is a large variety of colors that different people describe as turquoise.

Now anyone in the printing business knows that people describe color in different ways. Your red might be someone else's maroon, but the research done here really hammered home to me the very different ways people will describe color. It is a good reminder for us all, both print buyers and printers. We can't assume when someone says turquoise that we all are on the same page.

The great thing about digital printing is that we can produce a press proof, so our customers will see exactly what colors are going to print. This way we can deal with these different expectations before the job is run.

Some Help Choosing Colors

Choosing colors for your custom labels doesn't have to be a tedious process. There are plenty of online tools out there today that can help you choose just the right look. When creating your labels there is often a base color that you want to include - it might be the color of your logo, or a color that fits with the product you are selling. The question is what colors should you put with this base color? Take advantage of the rich color of digital label printing and choose something other than black or white.

Here is a brief review of some of the online tools that can help you choose color schemes for your products:

Kuler - developed by Adobe, Kuler allows you to create your own color schemes or you can see what other people are doing. Like many of these tools, Kuler will show you what are the most popular color schemes that have been created. When you register, you can vote on different people themes and the most popular ones rise to the top. I created the color scheme at the top of this post with Kuler using the color of the left hand column of this blog as the base color. Kuler then suggested some colors that match well with it.

COLOURlovers - this site describes itself as a resource that monitors and influences color trends. As the site suggests it is for people who are really passionate about color, in fact it calls the registered users of its site "lovers". COLOURlovers has a very useful search feature when you can type in keywords to search for color palettes. For example, if you have a lime flavored product you could type in "lime" and you will see all the color palettes that have been created with lime as part of the theme. Like Kuler, they feature the most popular colors as voted on by the sites "lovers", and they also feature new color trends that they see emerging.

ColorBlender - this site is a little different in that it lets you make tweaks to your color palette on the fly by just dragging a button across one of the Red, Green or Blue channels. ColorBlender does not make you register to use any of its features, and it does not focus on a community like Kuler and COLOURlovers. It is a simple, easy to use web site that will blend matching colors for you. You can even save your own blends for future use like the other sites. If you want a site that is very quick to master, ColorBlender is the site for you.

The beautiful thing about working with color these days is that there are so many tools available for you. These three web sites are all free and they provide a useful resource for anyone working with color. You can easily use these tool to help you match color for your products labels, your web site, or anywhere color is important.

What Does "K" Stand for in CMYK?

CMYK, also known as four color process, is the standard in the printing industry for reproducing full color images. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the colors used in four color process printing. So this begs the question - why is it not called CMYB?

Well the answer is two-fold. Back in the old days of printing when all printing was done using plates the black plate was actually called the Key plate. This was because it contained the artistic detail or "key" information. Look at the pictures below and to the left  (courtesy of Wikipedia) that show the breakdown of a photo into the components of CMYK. You can see that the most detail is in the black color - hence the name for the black plate being the Key plate.

The second reason has to do with avoiding confusion with another very popular color model - RGB. RGB stands for Red-Green-Blue and this is how computer monitors and televisions represent color. Even though no one refers to the Black plate as the Key plate anymore, to avoid confusion with the RGB model, the four color process model has remained as CMYK.