Key or key plate is an old-school printing term that refers to the printing plate with the most detail. That plate was commonly used for the color black. The plate was used to line up the color registration of the printing plates for the other colors; therefore, it was called the key plate.
The CMYK acronym stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key: those are the colours used in the printing process. A printing press uses dots of ink to make up the image from these four colours. 'Key' actually means black. It's called Key because it's the main colour used to determine the image outcome.
The abbreviation CMYK refers to the four ink plates used: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black).
The K in CMYK stands for "Key", NOT black as many might have you believe. The Key plate, in traditional color separations, is the plate that holds the detail in the image. In CMYK this is usually done with black ink.
The black is referred to as K denoting key, a shorthand for the printing term key plate. This plate impresses the artistic detail of an image, usually in black ink.
Why is CMYK black not black? If you use 100% K to create a black in CMYK color mode, you'll end up with a deep gray, not a true black. To get rich black, you need to add the right amount of all four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
Regular black has CMYK values of: C = 0, M = 0, Y = 0, K = 100. Rich black uses CMYK values of: C = 60, M = 60, Y = 60, K = 100.
CMYK is a subtractive type of colour process, meaning unlike RGB, when colours are combined light is removed or absorbed making the colours darker instead of brighter.
Cyan, magenta and yellow are the primary colors, and they combine to create black. (Black is the “K” in “CMYK.”) RGB mode creates the maximum color combinations, with 16.7 million colors compared to CMYK's 16,000 possibilities. Despite having more color possibilities, RGB files are usually smaller than CMYK files.
What is the difference? The characters stand for the color cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y) and key (K, black).
Information about Black / #000000
In a CMYK color space (also known as process color, or four color, and used in color printing), hex #000000 is made of 0% cyan, 0% magenta, 0% yellow and 100% black. Black has a hue angle of 0 degrees, a saturation of 0% and a lightness of 0%.
(1) (Color Key) See prepress proof. (2) Also called "chroma key," it is a technique for superimposing one video image onto another. Widely used to place an interesting scene behind people such as a news reporter on TV, it is also used for creating special effects such as floating a car on the ocean.
Clavis Publishing, New York launches Key Colors, the two-yearly national contest for illustrators of children's books. Only a children's book, intended for children from 2 to 7 years old, can qualify for the award. A professional jury will judge the artistic, literary and child-oriented qualities of the works.
An alternate term for black ink used in multi-color printing. When letterpress was the dominant printing process, black was always the first ink down, the registration of all the subsequent colors being keyed to the black. In process color terminology, the "K" in CMYK stands for "key," or black.
CMYK uses subtractive colors, not additive. Adding colors together in CMYK mode has the opposite effect on the result as RGB does; the more color added, the darker the results. Therefore, colors are taken away, or subtracted, to create a light result.
Because the RGB scheme has a greater range of colors, CMYK cannot produce brighter colors. These hues are beyond the CMYK range and will come out darker and more dull when printed than what you see on your display.
Open Adobe Acrobat Pro, open to the Print Production tools. Choose Preflight. Click the Single Fixups button. In the Convert Colors fixups, choose Convert Registration Color to CMYK Black Only.
100% Black (K) is mainly used for black text. Technically this standard black is set in InDesign (and other programs) to overprint backgrounds to avoid ink misregistration when the document is printed.
CMYK is a subtractive color model, meaning you add more ink colors to achieve black. Different ink colors absorb and reflect light in different wavelengths. RGB is a additive color model, meaning the more RGB light beams added, the closer to white you will get. If no light is emitted, you will see black.
These are the inks used in 4-color process printing. These four colors are combined to create most colors. CMYK colors are subtractive, meaning the colors get darker as they are blended together. The combination of equal amounts of CMY creates black, but not a true black due to the impurities of the inks.
Keep in mind that most modern printers can handle RGB content. Converting to CMYK early won't necessarily ruin the outcome, but might result in the loss of some color gamut, especially if the job is going on a digital press such as the HP Indigo or a wide-gamut device such as a large format inkjet printer.
Essentially, any colors produced with RGB on the digital space will not create the same output on the physical print. This is based on the color gamut, which in other words means that translating RGB to CMYK usually allows the color to convert only as close to the original appearance of the display screen.
In CMYK, blue is one of the most challenging colors to reproduce accurately. We suggest you use even and balanced mixtures, like 100-50-0-0. Otherwise, the result will be a purple or green color.