Adobe Photoshop Software About Printing CMYK vs CMY (Part 1) Step by Step Video Tutorial

Now that we are on the topic of printing, let us see if it is possible to fake darker values without having any black ink?

In order to achieve this result we will have to follow a few strict steps in the right order.

This video is part of a Mini-Series.
Next video covers Printing – CMYK Mode and Channel Docker.

Video Transcript

Alright, guys, In today's video, we're gonna be looking at some printing options for the C. M. Y K versus C. M. Y. But before that, let's have a quick intro first. So today's video can be found on softwaretraining.co.za. And we make short and easy to watch problem solving videos. And we also have the updates. Otherwise, if we head into the programme here. So now this video, our mini series is gonna be done with a Photoshop. So if you have Photoshop, you can follow along. Maybe in the future we'll do a few different alternatives to Photoshop. But seeing that this is your standard, this will be a good place to start. Now, what we're gonna be doing in this mini series we're gonna be looking at, how can you still get a dark colour printed? Uh, if you do not have black ink in your printer, so there's a little hack we can use where we can actually add dark colours. It won't be pure black or that dark, but it will still be dark enough, so we can, um, see the difference. So I'm just gonna swap this one is our basic, uh, c M Y k. And if I go to this one over here, this is just C M y. There's no K, but as you can see, we have black. It is not 100% black, but it is, uh, good enough to print like this and still get a nice result. So that's pretty much what we're gonna be running through in this mini series. But in order to do that, it's just a few things we need to set up first. The first thing I wanna do is I'll colour picker here on Photoshop. I just wanna set this so that we can actually see the K or the C m Y K. So, in order to do that, I'm just gonna zoom in here for you guys. And then, um, let me just fix my zoom quick here on the top, right? We've got these little lines or our colour picture. When our colour picture is active, we've got these four lines. I'm gonna click on that, and it's gonna give us a drop down menu of options. So by default, it's on a UK. But it might be different for you, but just you can see under the list which one we're looking for. If I go down, we're looking here for the C M Y K sliders. I'm gonna click that. And now it has updated our r GB or YouTube to C. M Y K. So now we can see all the values of that. So now, just to make sure it works, I'm gonna go to our colour picker here on the tool bar and just select that. And then I'm gonna go in a dark spot, maybe here where pinky and thumb connects just between that click that and then you can see over here. Our K currently is 42 so it uses quite a bit of black, but it's not pure black. Now, what I'm gonna do is let's head over to the one that's just C m y. Then we're gonna do the same thing. Use a colour picker, go between the pinky and thumb here and that little gap. Click that and now you can see we've got zero K. So this little, uh uh, colour picker or slider helps. So we can confirm that Yes, we do not have any K in this image because sometimes you can convert it wrong. And then you still have K where you think you don't. So now we can just confirm we can see that we've got zero k, But we have a dark colour, as we can see here on our actual, um colour Swatch, we can see. Let me just zoom again. We've got a dark colour, but there's zero K or zero black, but yeah, otherwise that is it. On the, um, basic set up, we're gonna be running through how to go about doing that, going from this result to something similar to this in the next few videos. But before that, if we head here to softwaretraining.co.za. You guys will notice we've got a variety of different Softwares we do cover, and you can also isolate your search here on the top or right, If you do not however, find the training videos you're looking for, just simply go. Yeah, request the training video, fill in the mini form and then we'll do our best to try and make that for you. But otherwise thanks, guys, for watching and cheers

This article is part of our “Large Format Printer Printhead colour channel manipulation workflow” – see the article for more info.