Lancaster House Printing & Design

Color Types

Color Mode

All color artwork and/or images must be provided in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) color mode. All black & white artworks and/or images must be provided in grayscale color mode.

Will your printed piece look exactly like it does on my computer monitor?

There are some small differences. Scanners and digital cameras create images using combinations of just three colors: Red, Green and Blue (called "RGB"). These are the colors that computers use to display images on your screen. But printing presses print full color pictures using a different set of colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (called "CMYK"). So at some stage your RGB file must be translated to CMYK in order to print it on a printing press. This is easily done using an image-editing program like PhotoShop.

You will have more control over the appearance of your printed piece if you convert all of the images from RGB to CMYK before sending them to us. When we receive RGB images, we do a standard-value conversion to CMYK, which may not look the same. We want you to be happy, so please, take the time to prepare your file properly. It's best if you do the RGB-to-CMYK conversion yourself.

Be aware that it is possible to make colors in RGB that you can't make with CMYK. What happens is that the translator just gets as close as possible to the appearance of the original and that's as good as it can be. It's something that everyone in the industry puts up with. So it's best to select any colors you use for fonts or other design elements in your layout using CMYK definitions instead of RGB.

You most likely won't notice this kind of color shift in a color photograph. It is more likely to happen if you pick a very rich, vibrant color for a background or some other element of your layout. It probably won't look bad, it just won't look exactly the same, or it may not be noticeable at all