Original subtitles

The CMYK color model's probably familiar to you if you've ever used an inkjet

printer at home or something like that.

If you've ever had to buy ink for it, it comes in these cartridges.

So C is cyan, M is magenta, Y is yellow, and K is kblack!

No, it's not, I'm just joking.

But it's not B for black, it's K for black, and I'll explain that in a second.

So the idea here is that these are subtractive colors.

It's all geared around the idea of printing with ink.

And so you're starting with no ink, which is a white, or complete, bright,

white surface.

And that by adding ink to it, you're removing some of that white, or

removing that brightness, and changing the color.

And so if you add all three colors together as much as possible,

sort of the total amount that you can, then you would end up with black.

And so just to finish that little explanation is that to save

ink with traditional printers,

instead of having to dump all three inks on the page just to make black.

They said, well,

why don't we just have a fourth color that we'll add as a different plate or

a different ink that we can put on the page, which will be nothing but black.

And so that was often used for things like line work, text labeling,

what they refer to as the key information, and so it became known as the key plate.

And the K is for key.

So there's a little trivia for you there.

That's why there is a K on the end instead of a B.

So it's CMYK, so K is black because it's the key plate.

So now you know.

So in a similar way to RGB, only kind of in reverse I suppose,

is that you're able to take those three colors and

mix them together in order to create all the other colors.

But whereas RGB was additive, you're adding light together,

think of this as subtractive,

as that the ink is being used to subtract from white to create other colors.

Well, we mix these together.

So we have cyan and magenta create blue.

Cyan and yellow create green.

Magenta and yellow create red.

And then all three of them together make black.

And in a similar way as before, like I was saying,

is that you can have gradations of each of these.

So you can mix a little bit of this one with a lot more of that one to create

all kinds of different colors and

gradations of those colors based on just mixing those three inks together.

If we look at how these are defined based on ArcGIS and the color models there,

we can see that here we've got our CMYK, so that's what we're seeing.

And so this cyan is 100% cyan there, so

we're going from white to pure cyan.

And then we could do the same thing with magenta, so that's 100% there.

And so you'll notice that with RGB it goes from 0 to 255,

with CMYK it goes from 0 to 100%.

That's just the way they work, just go with it, that's how it works, okay?

And so yellow, we've got yellow here up to 100%.

So I hope you get the idea there.

And really, that's all three is to it.

If we wanted to find any of these colors, we can mix and match the CMY and

K in order to create all these different colors.

And if you're thinking about your final map output as being something that's going

to be printed, especially if it's going to be printed using CMYK,

which is pretty common.

Then you may want to use the CMYK color model all the way through the process.

And it's just the way I've been able to make sure that the way that

the colors are being defined will be the way that it's described to the printer

that's going to be doing it in the end.

I don't know as much anymore, if this is a critical thing.

I know many years ago, when I was first starting out,

I was working with a professional publishing company, printing company,

that was going to create a big poster for me I was creating for one of my clients.

And it was really important, they said, to make sure

that I was using CMYK in order that it would sort of translate in the most

high fidelity way possible from my digital file to the actual printed page.

So a little bit of advice there, and so that's our CMYK color model.