00:04 Today we’re going to talk about the CMYK color space and the two most common CMYK color printer profiles. It’s important to note that a color printer profile is the behavior or the characteristics of a printing condition. It’s important to note that when dealing with your commercial printer to ask them which color printer profile or which color specification they print to and use that profile. Here at HiDefColor.com, we support the GRACoL color specification.

00:40 The important thing to note is we’re going to be – you’re actually looking at CMYK color model is plotted in the LAB color space. The LAB color space is a three axis determination of what a color is going to be, so it’s absolute.

01:00 The first axis is the L channel or the lightness which goes from white to black. Now that is going from top to bottom and it’s also important to note that along this axis is where your grays are going to be; your gray balance here, fifty percent gray, seventy five, twenty five and so-on are going to be down the center of that axis.

01:22 The second axis, the A axis goes from a cyan/green over to magenta/red color and the B axis goes from blue to yellow. So within this area here is where we’re going to plot all of our colors.

01:38 We’re going to go from our lightest colors up here, to our darker colors down here. So in the center is where all your neutral colors are going to be. We’ll start with our first color printer profile, that will be the SWOP color printer profile.

01:51 When we turn that on, you can see we’ve generated a three-dimensional wire frame of that color model. You go from our paper-white, down to our shadows, and then across from our primary colors our reds, our blues, greens, to our subtractive primaries our yellow, cyan and magenta. And from the top down – looking straight down – you can see that we plotted the outside circumference of our color space, so you can see our color a little better, along with our three-dimensional wireframe.

02:27 The second option is the GRACoL color printer profile. Now, i’m going to bring that in. You will notice that when i click this on, that the GRACoL color printer profile completely engulfs the SWOP color printer profile.

02:41 Looking down here at the bottom – follow the cursor – you’ll notice from the top down the shadow, or the circumference, is much larger than the SWOP color gamut, meaning that you have more color that’s accessible when you convert from RGB to CMYK. You’re going to get a larger color gamut and this is displaying graphically what the larger color gamut is with the GRACoL color profile.

03:04 It’s important to note that you can’t just choose a profile. You have to understand what profile or what specifications your printer is running to. So if you convert to a SWOP profile and you’re printing GRACoL, there’s going to different results.

03:19 So again, what I want to do here is i’m going to change the opacity of the GRACoL so you can see better how much more color is available resulting in a larger color gamut.

03:31 We’ll get this spinning here so you can look around the different colors and look at the top down and also look at the wireframe to see how much more color. There’s more volume of color for you to work with to get a better reproduction in CMYK when you convert from RGB.