Digital Prints

4
Understanding and
Managing Color
Color—and how it affects your printing—is one of those mysterious subject pits. Many
people have a hard time wrapping their minds around digital color, so as I’ve done before,
I’ll break it down into bite-size pieces.
Color Basics
To understand color, we need a quick course in color theory.
What Is Color?
Color is what happens when our eyes perceive different wavelengths of light, which is that
part of the electromagnetic spectrum that occurs roughly between 380 and 760 nanometers.
A namometer (“nm” or one billionth of a meter) measures the distance between
the crests of a light wavelength. Wavelengths shorter than 380 nm are outside our ability
to see them, and they’re called ultraviolet or UV. Wavelengths just over 760 nm are likewise
invisible and are called infrared or IR.
There are lots of other types of electromagnetic radiation like X-rays, microwaves, radar,
and radio, and those are also invisible because our eyes and the rest of our vision apparatus
are sensitive only to a tiny slice of the energy pie (380–760 nm). This is called the
visible spectrum, or more commonly, just light (see Figure 4.1).
The basis of color is trichromacy, which refers to the three color channels or receptors of
the human retina. What this means is that with only three primary colors in either the
subtractive or additive color systems, all—or most—of the other colors can be created.