At Brick City Printing we use an RGB workflow. Why? The short answer is, the colors in our prints look better this way! Adobe RGB is our ICC profile of choice.
RGB is an additive color space based on the wavelengths of light. RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue and refers to color wavelengths. You make new colors by adding wavelengths. Adding all of the colors together gives you white. RGB is used on monitors and in photography.
CMYK is a subtractive color space. You can only create a new color by removing wavelengths from your ink. When you add new wavelengths, your color now has both the new wavelength and the one you started with. Adding all the colors gives you black. Thus CMYK is subtractive.
Technically all printing is done in CMYK as prints do not emit light. And all digital editing is done in RGB since monitors do emit light to produce color. CMYK by nature has a smaller color gamut than RGB. There are fewer possible color in the CMYK space. Color profile conversion algorithms attempt to interpret a CMYK color space on your RBG monitor, and often result in duller, less saturated version, designed to more accurately represent the color when printed.
The printer industry have begun releasing printers with additional ink colors like Green, Orange, Light Cyan, etc. in recent years to attempt to more accurately represent the color gamut available on monitors. Therefore, when using these printers we often get better results from starting with an RGB color profile image.
At Brick City Printing, some of our printers still utilize the old CMYK-only inks. But when possible we use the more modern 8-ink setup. Therefore we get the best results starting with the wider RGB color space, and then allowing the press operators to do the conversion applying the color profile most suited to your art and output printer.
If you're a designer wondering what color space we work with, we prefer an entirely RGB workflow. Adobe RGB 1998 is our ICC Profile of choice.
