As a digital designer or illustrator, you’ve probably heard of RGB, CMYK, and Pantone, but do you know what they all mean? It’s important to use the correct color profiles for your digital designs to get the best consistent quality in your results.
What Are Color Profiles?
Color profiles or color modes are the type of color your digital art document uses. Generic color modes are CMYK, RGB, and Pantone, but there are more specialist color modes within those.
Different software or devices sometimes have specific color modes. For example,Procreate has a choice of color profilesas well as some specific Apple-only RGB profiles. You might also use different color profiles depending on the global region you’re printing designs.
Colors are not always viewed equally on screens. Different color profiles are used when you’re printing a design, creating a screen-based design, or professionally printing large-scale designs for multiple runs.
If you’re creating digital or printed art, you should learn about color profiles and when to use them correctly. This ensures your results are always correct, consistent, and the best quality they can be.
What Is CMYK?
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CMYK is a print-based color profile that stands for four colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black (which is known as Key in the design industry). By mixing these four colors, all other colors can be created in print.
CMYK is also known as four-color process or process color, named as such because four printing plates are used in the printing process. CMYK is an additive process, meaning printing CMYK adds each layer of color via a halftone technique which results in full-color prints.
When to Use CMYK
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If your intention is to print, you should always create your documents in a CMYK profile. If you’recreating a brand style guideor logos, for example, you should supply CMYK color variations alongside RGB and Pantone, if possible.
It’s much easier to convert a document from RGB to CMYK, and many online printers do this—such as whenprinting from Canva’s print store. But if you know from the initial design that you’ll print the result, it’s best to create the document in CMYK mode rather than converting it later, because that doesn’t yield perfect results.
Compared to RGB, CMYK colors often appear muted. This is due to the additive nature of CMYK printing and the lack of ability to recreate bright hues. To achieve brighter printed colors, you should use Pantone colors.
What Is RGB?
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RGB is the color profile used for digital or screen-based artwork and imagery, and it stands for Red, Green, and Blue. It uses a reductive process with light to create color, which provides a much larger color range result than CMYK.
The more light used, the brighter the hues, and the less light used, the darker the hues—which is how black is made in RGB, with a total absence of light.
RGB colors are reductive in nature. This means the more colors—or light—are used, the lighter or whiter they appear. The fewer colors—or light—are used, the darker they appear. Similar to switching a light on or off.
When to Use RGB
RGB color profiles should be used for any digital designs that are made for the screen. This includes animation and video, social media posts, logo variations, character portraits, and anything else to be viewed on a screen or device.
Of course, sometimes you may want to print something later after having made it with RGB color modes. In this case, it’s much easier to create in RGB and convert your document to CMYK for printing than the other way around.
When converting RGB to CMYK, due to RGB profiles creating a larger gamut of colors, the CMYK equivalent will often be more muted than the original RGB document. This is important to note, especially if colors are integral to your design.
What Is Pantone?
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Pantone colors are not exactly a color profile you can choose to create a document in, but are a global color consistency. Also known as PMS—Pantone Matching System—Pantone is a color type you can use for your printed design and art documents using color swatches.
As you might know already, Pantone is one of the world’s leading color companies. Typically, Pantone specializes in paint, but in the design world, Pantone colors are also a global benchmark of consistency.
When to Use Pantone Colors
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For a hobby designer, illustrator, or digital artist, you might not ever need to use Pantone colors. But if you’re designing and printing large-scale color-matched items—especially for globally recognized brands—Pantone will be your best bet for precise colors.
Adobe Creative Cloud software used to keep a Pantone color palette in its programs, but that was removed in 2022.You have to pay for a Pantone bookletif you wish to use consistent colors across large branding. The booklet colors provide a printed swatch with a title and a number—this is how thePantone Color of the Yearis displayed.
Pantone color or spot color can be used to create specialty colors like neons and metallics that can’t be printed with the typical four-color process. You can also use thePantone Studio app in which you can create color palettes.
Using a Pantone color system, you’ll ensure getting the exact color required for the job, regardless of your screen calibration and where the printing is taking place. But you should alwayscalibrate your screen monitor for accurate colorsto avoid disappointment when printing from an uncalibrated monitor.
Largely, Pantone matching systems are used by brands with precise and iconic colors, such as Amazon or UPS, where the brand might be recognized internationally, and thus, printed in different countries or by different manufacturers. A PMS color provides exact colors across the board, no matter who designs and who prints the collateral.
Know Which Color Profile to Use
You’ve seen the acronyms for color profiles, but with so many options, it’s hard to know which ones to use. Any type of CMYK profile should be used for generic printed designs, and RGB for designs kept on screens and devices. Pantone colors should be reserved for professional brand printing to ensure global consistency no matter where, how, or when the design is printed.
