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What is the full form of CMYK?
Full form of CMYK: Here, we are going to learn what does CMYK stands for? CMYK – which is an abbreviation of "Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key or Black" in Computer Acronyms/Abbreviations, etc.
Submitted by Anushree Goswami, on August 22, 2020
CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key or Black
CMYK is an abbreviation of Cyan, "Magenta, Yellow, and Key or Black", in which Key is black. It is a color model based on the subtractive color mixing of the CMY color model. This model is used for color printing, in which these four-color ink plates are used, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
The meaning of subtractive color mixing is it subtracts or diminishes the colors red, green and blue, which are reflective from white light by the help of ink plates and because of this process it resulted as cyan after the subtraction or reduction of red from white light, magenta after the subtraction of green from white light, and yellow after the subtraction of blue from white light.
Black ink advantages
In addition to cyan, magenta, and yellow in subtractive color mixing, fourth color black is used in color printing for the reason that by mixing the realistic cyan, magenta, and yellow inks to sell and make a profit the "black" color produced by them is substandard and unacceptable.
The advantages of using black color ink are:
- It provides fine detail in printing text-based content, which can't be possible to put out by using other three-color ink plates devoid of minor vague impressions.
- The use of black inks makes the cost price of color printing less expensive in contrast to the equivalent invested sum of colored inks.
- In a variety of situations, a black keyline was used in the form of an outline and also as a color indicator to make the content framework printed in black. In general, the keyline is included in the black plate and this is the reason K in CMYK corresponds to the keyline or black plate, which is also occasionally called the key plate.
Reference: CMYK color model
Algo tagged in: Dictionary – 'C'