Road to printing: Color space

Second step on the road, color space. Short article, and this time it’s not easy to illustrate with examples. To do this, you would need both the digital version and printed version. At least, I can provide a page from one booklet I got from Tinkle.
After sketching and inking, there is the coloring, in SAI, openCanvas, CG-illust, or Photoshop. What will interest us here, is not the software, but the screen on which the artist are drawing.

The screen, is in my opinion, the weak link on the road to printing.
On the one hand, screens are light emitting devices, which means they are using a RGB ( Red, Green, Blue ) color system. All color are obtained then by mixing these 3 lights. On the other hand, printed material are light absorbing like more of our surrounding. As such, the color space is CMYK ( Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black ). They all are the complementary colors of the RGB space, but they have to add one ink, black, because the quality of a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow aren’t as good as indian ink; it looks brown.

The one big problem is that RGB, and CMYK doesn’t cover the same color, meaning that the screen can’t display some color possible in printing, and some color possible on screen aren’t possible when printing. Here I’m not sure how artist are choosing their color space. For web, obviously they can use RGB, but if they print it, it might looks different. For printing, they just can’t have the full CMYK gamut on screen, which is my opinion, limiting for them.

It seems that it’s possible to work on an artwork after it’s printed, but since I cant’t read Japanese, I will not comment on it; I would rather not spread misinformation.

2009
11/29
CATEGORY
Merunpedia
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3 comments

  1. Where did you get that “Making of HANGA” page from? Is that the Tinkle team in the pictures?!

    BTW, I think they are just manually modifying and airbrushing the printed picture — could be one of those one-print only artworks sold at Jeuness.

    • Merun
    • November 29th, 2009

    It’s a page from Tinkle’s artwork II, a booklet for a Jeuness event. I guess it’s as you say, one-print only artwork.

    Then, I don’t know if it’s the team ^^;. Would be better than hearing that it’s two men. I mean that in front of the screen, it could be Harukaze Setsuna; or so I hope.

  3. I’ve heard that Tinkle is a group of two girls. I don’t know if it’s true, though.
    Awesome finding!

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