What's wrong with this picture?
Did you notice that the Fedora 7 disc and the Fedora 16 sleeve are looking at little... purple? Not the Fedora blue we are used to? Further, did you notice the fonts on the Fedora 7 disc do not match the other materials here?
The reason the items on the left came out purple is because they were printed using RGB, not CMYK.
What is RGB? What is CMYK?
I'm going to give you the quick, whirlwind, simplified explanation here to take up the least amount of your time and energy. If you want to dive in more, there are resources listed at the end that you can use as a start to read up in more detail on this.
- CMYK is for printing. It specifies what mix of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK ink colors should be used in which areas of the design to be printed. If you sent anything to a professional printing company, make sure it is CMYK.
- RGB is for on-screen display and projection. It specifies, per pixel in your LCD screen, whether or not each of the Red, Green, and Blue lamps is turned on, and if it is turned on, how intense/bright it is set. If you send Fedora artwork to a printer in RGB mode, it WILL turn out purple!
How can I check if the file I have is RGB or CMYK?
Glad you asked! There's two ways you can do this, via the command line or via a nice GUI tool called CMYK Tool.
I will give you one quick trick though to know for sure if a particular file is definitely RGB and not CMYK:
If it is an SVG created by Inkscape, it is RGB, and not suitable for printing!
Checking via the command line
yum install ImageMagick
identify -format %[colorspace] <<strong>filename</strong>>
Example output might look like this if your file is CMYK:
[duffy@pandamotor]$ identify -format %[colorspace] balloon.pdf CMYK
It would look like this if you rfile is RGB:
[duffy@pandamotor]$ identify -format %[colorspace] balloon.pdf CMYK
Further Reading
- Wikipedia article on CMYK
- Wikipedia article on RGB
- "Color management, (soft)proofing and CMYK with FLOSS" by David Revoy
- [http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/getting-cmyk-colors-from-inkscape-to-scribus
Getting CMYK colors from Inkscape to Scribus for printing] from LibreGraphicsWorld
- "I found my RGB colours again" by Dennis Appelon