Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Covering the differences between CMYK and RGB.
Quick reference
CMYK vs RGB
Covering the differences between CMYK and RGB.
When to use
Knowing when to use CMYK and when to use RGB is something that many new and inexperienced designers will either ignore or be unfamiliar with. By learning the difference early on, you can get a leg up on many of the other designers just starting out.
Instructions
- Launch Adobe Illustrator
- Choose ‘New…’ from the Start Workspace
- Select one of the presets or templates available from either mobile or web and take note of the color mode.
Hints & tips
- Try to change the color mode to CMYK and notice the small caution symbol
- Select one of the presets for a print document and notice that when you have CMYK selected here, you will no longer see the same yellow symbol (unless you try to change this setting to RGB).
- 00:04 Now picking up where we left of from the last lesson, I wanted to talk to you
- 00:07 guys a little bit more about the color modes for your projects.
- 00:11 Now depending on what kind of project you're going to create, whether it's
- 00:14 mobile, web, print and so forth, you wanna be mindful of your color settings.
- 00:20 Now even though you can change these later on, it's important to try and
- 00:23 get them right from the get go.
- 00:25 So that's why I say that it's important to think about the type of project that
- 00:28 you're gonna be using, where it's going to appear.
- 00:32 And that way you'll be able to determine which settings you wanna use.
- 00:36 So for example, if I'm over on the print tab,
- 00:38 you'll see that by default my color mode is CMYK.
- 00:42 And that just stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and
- 00:45 black, that is a four color printing process
- 00:47 where all those four colors combined will create any other color.
- 00:52 And that is typically the standard that you wanna use in print.
- 00:56 You should not be using a RGB color mode for any of your print pieces.
- 01:01 But, if you wanted to create something say for film or
- 01:04 video or one of these first two for web or
- 01:07 mobile, you'll probably want to go with RGB which is just red, green and blue.
- 01:13 And this are the colors that are used to create all the other colors
- 01:16 in these kinds of situations.
- 01:19 So, if I'm over here on web, and you can see that my color mode setting is on RGB,
- 01:25 sure I can change it to CMYK, but I'll get this little yellow caution symbol here,
- 01:30 and that's basically just a warning kind of saying are you sure you wanna do this?
- 01:35 And in this situation, I'm gonna stick with RGB instead.
- 01:39 And conversely if I come over here to the print tab and I try and
- 01:43 change it to RGB color, you'll see the same kind of warning, okay?
- 01:48 So you wanna be mindful of this kinds of things as you're working but
- 01:53 there are other types of colors that you could use.
- 01:56 Another type of color that you typically see a lot in prints, is pantone and
- 02:00 those are pantone chips which there are solid, coded, and
- 02:04 uncoded books which are sometimes used in printing to match colors up.
- 02:10 And another type of color that you may commonly see used in web or
- 02:15 mobile would be a hexadecimal value or
- 02:18 hexadecimal color which is basically a six digit combination of numbers and
- 02:23 letters that is used on web and things like that to identify colors.
- 02:28 But the only ones we need to be concern with right here in this
- 02:32 menu are RGB and CMYK.
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