From the course: Illustrator for the In-House Designer

Digital color considerations - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator for the In-House Designer

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Digital color considerations

- [Instructor] Color models are the way we describe the visible range of colors that we see or, more importantly perhaps for us as designers, that we can achieve in the medium we are preparing work for. In digital graphics, these models are RGB for screen projects and, in the main, CMYK for color in print. Now, although they describe the same things such as, for example, red or orange or yellow or any of the other colors you can think of by name, they do it in different ways. And the range of colors that can be produced is very different between the two. This is because RGB colors are produced using different levels of energy to produce those colors. And CMYK absorbs light as it passes through inks on paper. Now, if we look here at this approximated diagram of the perception of human color, you'll see that RGB fills quite a chunk of that but there's lots and lots of colors where you can see outside of it. Now this, just to point out, is a fairly generic RGB space that I'm using here, because there are lots of different ones. And space is a way of describing some sort of derivative of a model. CMYK does an even smaller range of those colors. You'll see there are some that can't be reproduced by either of those models. And other spaces increase that, so you might hear of SRGB or Adobe RGB 1998. And these are called wide-gamut spaces. But you have to aim for the stuff that fits inside of the gamut you're producing things for. So work in RGB when you're working in Illustrator and, ideally, try to stay close to colors that are considered web-safe. Because, in addition to these theoretical spaces, devices have their own space, too.

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