Printing Color

CMYK and Pantone

The CMYK process is a method of printing color by using four inks — cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. A majority of the world's printed material is produced using the CMYK process, and there is a special subset of Pantone colors that can be reproduced using CMYK .Those that are possible to simulate through the CMYK process are labeled as such within the company's guides.

The Pantone system also allows for many special colors to be produced. While most of the Pantone system colors are beyond the printed CMYK gamut, it was only in 2001 that Pantone began providing translations of their existing system with screen-based colors. Screen-based colors use the RGB color model — red, green, blue — system to create various colors.