Digital Prints

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Mastering Digital Printing
When you add this to the idea of “visual blending” covered in Chapter 2, you begin to
understand how we are able to print and view color images.
With subtractive color, light is reflected off objects that absorb some of its wavelengths and
let others continue on. Our eyes interpret those remaining wavelengths as color. In other
words, the color of an image on a piece of paper is what’s left over after the ink and the
paper have absorbed or subtracted certain wavelengths (see Figure 4.2). If green and red
are absorbed, what we end up seeing is called blue, which is in the 400–500 nm range. If
cyan and magenta are absorbed, we see yellow. If we keep subtracting wavelengths by piling
on more dyes or pigments, we end up with black. (See Chapter 7 for a more in-depth
look at printing inks and color.)
Figure 4.1 Light is only a small sliver
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Figure 4.2 When full-spectrum white
light that contains all wavelengths (left)
strikes the sky portion of the print, the
red wavelengths are absorbed
(subtracted), and the green and blue
ones are reflected back to produce the
cyan color we call “sky blue.” All the
wavelengths are reflected back from the
white clouds since there are no dyes or
pigments there.