printers vs artists
Mr. N
skill at manipulating the cyan, magenta, and yellow
ink which comes out of my printer, I set out to understand
paint.
One would guess that artists have faced the various
CMY combinations for hundreds of years. Imagine
my surprise when I found that not a single art store
sells cyan paint. Not one. Not acryllic, not oil, not
tempra, not watercolor. They don't sell cyan.
My disappointment was not diminished when I
brought home some "pure magenta" only to conclude
that if this was "pure", it was a whole different
definition of pure than Photoshop has. Maybe
C0,M100,Y0,B40, but it seemed even more
perverse than that. At least they sell something
_called_ magenta, though.
Maybe even worse, the colors of the art world seem
utterly twisted from Photoshop. They show "red"
and "blue" primary colors along with yellow on a
color wheel. Now I'd be willing to believe that when they
say red they mean magenta, and when they say
blue they mean cyan, but this seems contradicted
when one looks at "red" paint and it's actually red.
Now I don't imagine the laws of physics are any
different for artists than they are for printers, but
at the very least they have an utterly distinct
terminology space.
Home Depot sells pre-colored paint too. No
cyan or magenta, but the guy mixing paint colors
sure knows them He offers a bit of cyan or magenta
pigment for free! And I'll bet there's nothing
funny about them either. A connection to the
"real" world has been found...
Can anyone take a shot at an explanation?
Are there well known synonyms for cyan, magenta,
and yellow used for mixing purposes?
N
Nicole Josan
printing. Nobody would design anything using that colors.
Grab a magnifying glass and examine your favorite magazine
(doesn't matter which one, could be anything). You'll see that
the colored pictures are made of tiny points which trick our
eyes into believing that they represent a certain color.
Only these colors (cmy) MIXED make sense.
Hope that helps a bit, it's difficult to explain in english.
Regards,
Nicole Josan
JS Graphic-Design
Mr. N
Nicole Josan wrote in message ...
>The CMY-K (key = black) is a system used for printing. ONLY for
>printing. Nobody would design anything using that colors.
Home Depot uses cyan,magenta, and yellow pigments to mix
paint. They use some others too, but they have these available.
>Only these colors (cmy) MIXED make sense.
I'm not sure how to parse that.
My newspaper uses them alone,
so you didn't mean that they cannot be used alone,
and paint is mixed from a wide variety of pigment colors,
including cmy, so they're not the only ones.
It sure seems that in an ideal world, maybe a world limited
to opaque paints, Home Depot would stock CMYK pigments,
and none others. I read that the difference between the ideal
world and the real world is the price of pigments. Some
colorants, such as iron oxide, are exceptionally inexpensive,
and thus are used when they can be used.
So why no cyan paint?
I see an artists paint color "ultramarine blue".
Available in large jars. Anyone know its relationship
to cyan?
Pthalo Blue?
N
Mark Dunlop
writes
>So why no cyan paint?
specific pigments/dyes are used for printing inks. CMYK is used in the
printing industry, but there is no reason why CMY in particular has to
be chosen for the primary colours in painting, the range of possible
colours is quite wide. You can have twenty or thirty primary colours if
you want.
>
>I see an artists paint color "ultramarine blue".
>Available in large jars. Anyone know its relationship
>to cyan?
Say about 80c 45m. Pure ultramarine is slightly outside the gamut of
cmyk printing. It used to be made from ground lapis lazuli, until a
French chemist synthesised it in 18 hundred and something.
>Pthalo Blue?
>
v. roughly 80c 50m 20k.
Artists' pigments are all specific chemical compounds, eg cadmium
sulpho-selenide, titanium oxide, etc, mostly chosen for their permanence
and stability. Some of them are poisonous, eg vermilion which is a
mercury compound. 'Student' paints use cheaper pigments to mimic more
expensive pigments, eg 'cadmium red hue' is about 1/4 the price of real
cadmium red.
--
Mark Dunlop
Thingfishhhh
> After developing a working ability, if no craftsman
> skill at manipulating the cyan, magenta, and yellow
> ink which comes out of my printer, I set out to understand
> paint.
One wonders why - for a job, or curiousity?
> One would guess that artists have faced the various
> CMY combinations for hundreds of years.
Nope-traditional color theory for painting (or for convenience, let's say
for "fine art") is based on the primaries of blue, red and yellow, or
specific pigments found in nature (or the lab, these days). Very few
artists use only red, blue and yellow paint in their pure form. White is
achieved either through the ground (paper of canvas or whatever surface
you are using) and black is achieved either through a mixture of red,
yellow and blue (try it - mix equal proportions of Cadmium medium red,
medium yellow and Ultramarine watercolor paints, and you CAN mix black.
It's pretty tricky, but once you do it, you'll never buy a tube of black
again. But then, you should'nt use black anyway, or that's what all my
teachers always said...) or pre-mixed black, like Mars black.
Cyan and magenta as specific hues as the basis of a theory of color in
fine art has never existed, as far as I know, in the fine art world. CMYK
are specific inks used by offset and inkjet printers to create color.
Red, yellow and blue primaries are linked to the cones in the eye, which
recognize color. There are red, yellow and blue cones, which is probably
why those colors are used as primaries. We see in those primaries, so it's
not suprising that fine art color theory evolved around them. Cyan and
magenta also do not occur in their pure form in nature, which has a LOT to
do with why they we'rent used by artists. Most paint colors used natural
pigments, like iron oxide or lapis lazuli. Many of the colors used in Fine
Art cannot be mixed from red, blue and yellow, like burnt sienna, curulean
and ultramarine blue, cadmium red, china white, cobalt blue, rose madder,
and Payne's grey. These are specific shades.
CMYK *reproduces* the colors we can see and that artists use, and for
technical reasons I don't remember are used in offset printing. I dimly
remember that using red, blue and yellow inks is a smaller gamut (range of
color) than what CMYK can reproduce, and cannot print as many subtleties,
and CAN come close to reprducing some of the shades I listed above without
having to mix specific ink colors. For that, the Pantone and other ink
color systems were created.
(for some background, I went to college and got a degree in Illustration,
which was heavy in color theory, and have painted and drawn most of my
life. I did'nt encounter CMYK until I got into graphics (I'm a graphic
designer these days) and offset printing. I worked for years at a fine art
publisher editing and color correcting paintings for printing as posters,
so my background came in handy.)
Imagine
> my surprise when I found that not a single art store
> sells cyan paint. Not one. Not acryllic, not oil, not
> tempra, not watercolor. They don't sell cyan.
That's right - they don't. You could have asked at the store - they would
have told you. It might be embarrassing, but you would have found your
answer sooner.
> My disappointment was not diminished when I
> brought home some "pure magenta" only to conclude
> that if this was "pure", it was a whole different
> definition of pure than Photoshop has.
Of course it is, paint colors are a *completely* different color model
than the colors in Photoshop. And Photoshop can't reproduce a "pure"
magenta, either, unless you have an expensive calibrated monitor, like a
Radius Pressview. Even then, as close as a Pressview gets, it's still an
*approximation* of the "pure" magenta on a press or from an inkjet or
color laser printer (which ain't THAT pure, compared to the magenta used
on a press, anyway).
Maybe
> C0,M100,Y0,B40, but it seemed even more
> perverse than that. At least they sell something
> _called_ magenta, though.
Magenta paint and Magenta inks are *completely* different things. They
share the same name, but that's where the similarity ends.
> Maybe even worse, the colors of the art world seem
> utterly twisted from Photoshop. They show "red"
> and "blue" primary colors along with yellow on a
> color wheel. Now I'd be willing to believe that when they
> say red they mean magenta, and when they say
> blue they mean cyan,
But that's NOT what they mean. The red, blue and yellow primaries on the
fine art color wheel has nothing to do with CMYK at all. Nothing. It's two
completely different color models.
Photoshop uses RGB or CMYK values to *simulate* colors found in nature. It
shows us RBG or CMYK values so we can modify them according to the
technologies reproducing them - ie. the phospors of your monitor (RGB) or
the CMYK inks on the press. It would make very little sense to have a
Levels dialog in Photoshop with red, yellow and blue channels, when you're
going to be modifying red, blue and green pixels on your screen.
but this seems contradicted
> when one looks at "red" paint and it's actually red.
Huh?
You lost me here. Red paint isn't "red"?
> Now I don't imagine the laws of physics are any
> different for artists than they are for printers, but
> at the very least they have an utterly distinct
> terminology space.
Artists are allowed to violate the laws of physics. We learn how when we
learn the secret handshake. :)
Seriously, tho, you've got it. They share terminologies and names, but
that's about it. The tech industry copied and borrowed liberally from the
art world when naming their stuff.
> Home Depot sells pre-colored paint too. No
> cyan or magenta, but the guy mixing paint colors
> sure knows them He offers a bit of cyan or magenta
> pigment for free! And I'll bet there's nothing
> funny about them either. A connection to the
> "real" world has been found...
More than likely Home Depot developed a paint matching system that uses
specific ground pigments that follow the CMYK model, which was probably
developed on a computer, thus the CMYK model being used. Most paint stores
I've been in use very specific pigments, like fine art paints, and there
was no "standard" I was aware of. I'll have to check it out.
Will a similar thing be developed for art?
I doubt it.
>
> Can anyone take a shot at an explanation?
> Are there well known synonyms for cyan, magenta,
> and yellow used for mixing purposes?
I think you're on a wild goose chase - there are no correlations between
rgb, CMYK and the red, blue, and yellow primaries used in fine art -
totally different technologies, theories, and color models. RGB doesnt
work for printing, CMYK is harder to make into a monitor, and RGB simply
won't work as printing inks.
It'd be nice to have a standardized model, but it's impossible.
Again, I ask why you want to do this? Is this specific to a project or
job, or just curious?
Thingfishhhh
> Nicole Josan wrote in message ...
> >The CMY-K (key = black) is a system used for printing. ONLY for
> >printing. Nobody would design anything using that colors.
>
> Home Depot uses cyan,magenta, and yellow pigments to mix
> paint. They use some others too, but they have these available.
> >Only these colors (cmy) MIXED make sense.
>
> I'm not sure how to parse that.
Most times, "pure" magenta and cyan are not printed. I've seen it done, as
an effect, but it's quite ugly. CMYK are generally used together, not as a
"spot" color, ie. all on it's own at 100%.
> My newspaper uses them alone,
I doubt that. I'll bet they are either using spot colors (custome mixed
inks), or have a *lousy* design staff. "Pure" magenta and cyan, from a
press, are quite ugly. Trust me, they are.
> so you didn't mean that they cannot be used alone,
> and paint is mixed from a wide variety of pigment colors,
> including cmy, so they're not the only ones.
I've never seen magenta or cyan pigments, at least in a art supply store.
(Home depot may have them, but I'd like to see how they compare to the
"pure" cyan and magenta used in printing.)
Very few artists use red and green and blue to mix their colors, oh, sure,
there are some purists, but most people buy the specific hue they want. If
I want to use a Sap green, I don't try to mix it from red and blue and
yellow paint - I *can't*. I buy a tube of it.
I think what you're confused with here is that the colors in the store are
NOT taken straight from the color wheel you see sold along side of them.
Ultramarine, and a lot of colors, do not exist on the wheel - the color
wheel explains the "theory" of color, not how specific shades interact
with each other. One learns that, to create "brown", you mix red and
green. (Or, red and blue and yellow, in a rough 2/1/1 mix). Now, i may
pick up a tube of burnt sienna - a specific shade of "brown" using
specific pigments. You *can't* mix burnt sienna from red and yellow and
blue. But as a "brown", I know where it fits on the color wheel, what it's
comlimentary color is, and how to modify it according to my color design
for my painting so it works.
Whereas the CMYK model DOES correspond directly to those specific colors
on the press, and adjustments are made by adjusting the percentage and
size of the printing dot of that specific color. When you want to print a
"brown" on your inkjet or opffset printer, you use a mixture of four inks,
and adjust accordingly. You don't go down to CompUSA and buy a burnt
sienna cartdridge for your Epson inkjet printer.
> It sure seems that in an ideal world, maybe a world limited
> to opaque paints,
No way, Jose. Give up watercolors? No freaking way.
Home Depot would stock CMYK pigments,
> and none others. I read that the difference between the ideal
> world and the real world is the price of pigments.
I doubt that. From what I remember there are *specific* reasons why CMYK
is used in offset printing, and price had nothing to do with it. I
*believe* the issue is flexibility and gamut - that the red, blue yellow
gamut of fine art color theory simply did'nt work as a color space to
produce images - it's too limited. . An artists isn't limited to a red,
yellow and blue palette, and it makes no sense to have a press running
unlimited numbers of ink. The CMYK model, I blieve was developed because
it could create MORE colors than red, blue and yellow could. Not all -
CMYK is one of the more limited gamuts (RGB is much bigger than CMYK,
color photography is larger than RGB, and "real" color, ie. what your eye
sees is the biggest gamut of all.)
Remember, painting and printing are two entirely different technologies.
It would be nice if they could share the same color space, but the laws of
nature make it impossible. Printing uses 4 specific colors - painting does
not. Color theory - emphasis on *theory*, uses three colors as primaries,
and uses the addition of black and white to create tonal variation.
Some
> colorants, such as iron oxide, are exceptionally inexpensive,
> and thus are used when they can be used.
>
> So why no cyan paint?
Because an artist would'nt know what to do with it - "cyan" doesnt exist
in his or her color "theory" and space. They *might* buy it as a specific
shade, but they would'nt have a clue how to fit it into their traditional
color wheel, and how it would relate to the primaries and secondaries.
> I see an artists paint color "ultramarine blue".
> Available in large jars. Anyone know its relationship
> to cyan?
None, except that it's a "blue" hue.
> Pthalo Blue?
None. See above.
Well, there is the fact that CMYK can't accurately reproduce either one.
Both are *specific* hues, using different pigments.
Cyan is a hue of ink used to *reproduce* a *wide* gamut of all blues,
using the other three colors, and the white of the paper.
The only analog between printing inks and paints is Pantone colors, but
that doesnt go far, because you don't mix Pantones to create other colors.
You're looking for connections that simply don't exist - I'm not saying
that to be snotty, i'm saying that to save you a lot of effort and
frustration.
Again, why are you doing this? Curiosity, or do you have a specific
project in mind?
Jack B.
news:Thingfishhhh-2...@ppp-206-170-29-184.wnck11.pacbell.net...
> recognize color. There are red, yellow and blue cones, which is probably
> why those colors are used as primaries. We see in those primaries, so it's
> not suprising that fine art color theory evolved around them
I believe that cones in the eye are usually referred to as red, green, and
blue.
Actually, each cone covers a range of wavelengths in a sort of bell shaped
curve fashion.
Jack B.
Jack B.
news:Thingfishhhh-2...@ppp-206-170-29-184.wnck11.pacbell.net...
> fine art has never existed, as far as I know, in the fine art world. CMYK
> are specific inks used by offset and inkjet printers to create color.
I happened to be in the local art supply store today and noticed that they
now sell artists' paints in the CMYK colors (plus white). There was a color
wheel on the back of the box that showed what quantities to mix to achieve
the desired colors.
Jack B.
Mr. N
Thingfishhhh wrote in message ...
>In article <7psm80$dej$1...@ocean.cup.hp.com>, "Mr. N" <n...@notforreal.net>
wrote:
>
>> After developing a working ability, if no craftsman
>> skill at manipulating the cyan, magenta, and yellow
>> ink which comes out of my printer, I set out to understand
>> paint.
>
>One wonders why - for a job, or curiousity?
Call it curiosity if you like...but there's something to be
said for developing an understanding of the fundamentals
of one's working world, and this kind of investigation is
the way some of us put the pieces together.
>Nope-traditional color theory for painting (or for convenience, let's say
>for "fine art") is based on the primaries of blue, red and yellow
So how does this color theory define "primary"?
Would an artist expect to mix blue and yellow and
get "clean" green (where clean means "no black")?
Does "primary" mean that any two of the three
colors can be mixed resulting in a clean result?
N
Mr. N
Jack B. wrote in message <7qckpo$hm3$1...@fir.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...
>Thingfishhhh <Thingf...@yahoo.net> wrote in message
>> Red, yellow and blue primaries are linked to the cones in the eye, which
>> recognize color. There are red, yellow and blue cones, which is probably
>> why those colors are used as primaries.
>
>I believe that cones in the eye are usually referred to as red, green, and
>blue.
This seems an exceptionally common error amongst those who
have a color theory of color based on red, blue, and yellow primary
pigment colors.
It sure seems you can't have it both ways. Either red is a primary
transmissive color or it is a primary non-reflective color, but it
sure isn't both, unless you call two very different colors "red".
Photoshop would suggest that there are two sets of primary colors,
RGB, and CMY. There are two because one transmits and the other
declines to reflect. No requirement to call two different colors "red".
RBY advocates claim Red and Blue as pigment primaries, and
seem a bit troubled that they're also transmissive primaries;
this troubledness shows up as a mistaken substitution of yellow
for green when discussing the transmissive primaries..as they
consolidate into byt one set of primaries.
N
Darkhop
>
> Thingfishhhh wrote in message ...
> >Nope-traditional color theory for painting (or for convenience, let's say
> >for "fine art") is based on the primaries of blue, red and yellow
>
> So how does this color theory define "primary"?
>
> Would an artist expect to mix blue and yellow and
> get "clean" green (where clean means "no black")?
I expect he meant green instead of yellow. I'm no expert, but color
mixing is different depending on whether your working with light or
pigments. RGB would be the primaries in light, but I know that in
pigment (i.e. paints) you can't get to yellow without using...yellow.
The physicist Richard Feynman had a funny story about this in one of his
books.
/JSH
Helmut P. Einfalt
Jack B. schrieb in Nachricht <7qfbd3$hnh$1...@fir.prod.itd.earthlink.net>...>news:Thingfishhhh-2...@ppp-206-170-29-184.wnck11.pacbell.net...
>> fine art has never existed, as far as I know, in the fine art world. CMYK
>> are specific inks used by offset and inkjet printers to create color.
>
>now sell artists' paints in the CMYK colors (plus white). There was a
color
>wheel on the back of the box that showed what quantities to mix to achieve
>the desired colors.
Which is fine, with the only limitation that CMYK covers only a relatively
small range of possible colors. If oyu look at a Pantone Book you'll find
that there are very limited CMYK equivalents (and the ones in the Pantone
book are printed with the utmost care!) to some of the solid colors -- CMYK
can do a lot, but is far from doing every color you might want as an artist.
Helmut
Helmut P. Einfalt
Mr. N
Helmut P. Einfalt wrote in message <7qh41p$2tf$1...@news07.btx.dtag.de>...
> limitation that CMYK covers only a relatively
>small range of possible colors. If oyu look at a Pantone Book you'll find
>that there are very limited CMYK equivalents (and the ones in the Pantone
>book are printed with the utmost care!) to some of the solid colors -- CMYK
>can do a lot, but is far from doing every color you might want as an
artist.
Helmut, can you explain what it is about these paint colors which
makes them impossible to achieve from CMY?
N