Color Your World - Technology Information

The leaves of fall are not the only source of bright colors right now. The computer world is also a colorful one, and we're not talking about the language used by Microsoft attorneys after being raked over the coals by an unsympathetic judge. Color is a key factor for a variety of computer applications. Virtually every Website makes full use of color. Digital cameras, scanners, and inexpensive color ink jet printers allow even the most casual computer user to think in rainbow terms. In recognition of this growing trend, here are some terms related to the hues of the computer world.

Color matching

Okay, we all know you can't wear brown shoes with black pants. But in computer applications, matching colors is more complicated than that. Say you especially like the shade of green shown on your monitor and want to use it in an eye-catching poster. But in actuality, the color produced by your desktop printer or by a professional printer or by a professional printer may differ from what you see on the screen due to the different process used in printing colors. The process of making sure that such colors are actually the same is known as color matching.

RGB

Sounds like some kind of a food additive, but this simply stands for Red-Green-Blue. RGB monitors create other colors by displaying red, green, and blue dots in different levels of intensity. In an RGB monitor, each of these three basic colors requires a separate signal. The highest intensity of all three levels results in white, whereas the lowest level creates black.

CMY

Like RGB, this also refers to color combinations (specifically Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, or the basic eye makeup used by the secretary on The Drew Carey Show). In this method of producing color, these three primary colors are manipulated with the base color, white, in varying percentages to create other colors. Related to CMY, CYMK adds black as a fourth color (K stands for black here, since B is already used to denote blue). CYMK is used in the full-color printing produced by commercial printers.

PMS

No, we're not going there. For our purposes, PMS stands for Pantone Matching System. In this system, standard numbers are assigned to each of more than 500 colors. That way, if you specify a certain color to a print shop by using a PMS number, you can be assured it will be accurately reproduced in the print job. Traditionally, this process has involved using a swatch book to select the appropriate PMS color. More recently, desktop publishing software has included built-in PMS features.

Process color

Also known as "you'll have to pay us big bucks to print your brochure," this is the printing process used to produce "full color" by combining cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks. On the printing press, this means using four different printing plates to produce one color image. This added complexity is the basic reason full-color documents cost more to produce than monochrome.

Bit depth

This has nothing to do with the damage your dog inflicted on the neighbor's ankle. Instead, it refers to the number of bits used in a pixel (a pixel being the smallest part of an image). The greater the bit depth, the more colors can be displayed. While the limit with 8 bits is 256 colors, you can get more than 16,000 hues with 16 bits. Moving up to 24 bits yields photorealistic color with more than 16 million shades. Bit depth is also known as color depth or pixel depth.

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