How many cmyk colours

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How many possible colors in CMYK? Ask Question. Asked 1 year, 3 months ago. Active 1 year, 3 months ago. Viewed times. Improve this question. Watch an old offset litho press running up the first sheets to know the answer is "infinite". Your estimate for RGB is only because you assume values per channel -- an artificial constraint.

The model does not care about byte values. Proof: there is such a thing as "bit RGB", with a much larger range. Are you asking how many colors can be specified in CMYK theoretical colors, we could call them or how many can be physically rendered as distinguishable colors? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. If its a laser, press But not a inkjet then the easy answer is: A 4 color printer can make 4 colors. The hard answer is: A 4 color printer can make 4 colors but it can mix an area with diferent colors a but like dithering on computer displays so how many colors it can display is dependent on the size of the raster screen.

The raster screen is technically user configurable so you can adjust how many colors mixtures it can make. If your red looks too pinkish, you have too much magenta in the mix. Changing the balance of these colours will produce mossy greens, a ruch rust colour, or earthy browns.

Cyan and yellow combine to make lovely green colours. For the most vibrant results, use them in equal parts and make them dense. Be careful when making yellow itself darker—it can easily become more of a mustard colour. In dense yellow mixtures, the finished colour can look more orange or green.

Cyan and yellow will produce a lovely green colour. For the most vibrant results, put them in equal parts and make them dense. As for yellow itself, be careful when making it darker. It can easily become more of a sage or mustard colour. In dense mixtures, it can become more orange or green. In CMYK, blue is one of the most difficult colours to reproduce accurately. Regal purple tones are CMYK friendly.

A magenta to cyan ratio is an excellent place to start Pinks in CMYK printing are all about the magenta. To make your pinks really pop, the magenta levels should be high, and the yellow, cyan, and black very low. True metallic gold finish is not possible with CMYK printing, but a flat or NMM non-metallic metal representation of gold can be produced. Some examples are shown below. If you want a true metallic finish, you will need to use a metallic Pantone spot ink to your design.

I know that the differences between a lot of similar colours might not be distinguishable by the human eye but that's by the by. My gut feeling is saying that this quantity of colour combinations isn't possible in CMYK but I can't work it out differently.

Allowing for the decimal points, is this correct? CMYK as a color model does not define a gamut, nor does it define a number of colors. Therefore, you can not state that a particular color model possesses any particular number of colors without knowing the bit depth and colorspace parameters.

For CMYK that means knowing the destination profile or device, even if you want to assume 8bit data. In other words, you can't just hand-wave away the printing technology as if it wasn't relevant, because it is determinant. The answer is that CMYK is a color model , but not a color space , and you need to define a colorspace which will then define the gamut size.

And gamut size is not related to number of colors. As for "theoretical number of colors" — you can calculate the number of combinations for a given bit depth, but if you mean the number of different colors you can print, or moreover, the number you can perceive, that's a much more complicated answer. Regardless of the gamut size and print technology, the theoretical number of colors is a function of the number of combinations of values for each of the color components.

Ultimately the OP's question is sort of an x-y question, he's asking about X, but really is asking about Y. His real question seems more like it is "how is color data encoded in a binary form"? There are comments that ,,,0 is the same as 0,0,0, — while this may be true in theory, it is not in a practical sense.

This is in part why K black is included in 4 color printing. In fact, there is a printing term "rich black" which is K black with a certain amount of CMY to deepen the black. Black is not even the same black, depending. What is not mentioned, and needs to be, is that unlike an additive color model such as RGB, you can not add all 4 CMYK colors at full level at once and hope to get a reasonable result.

For instance, rich black is not ,,, There are limitations to the density of ink applied to the page if you want a print run that is not going to have significant issues. So, in CMYK, you can't simply multiply the total number of values per color. And you need to use a look up table LUT that models the specific output device printer to calculate the number of colors available in that device's gamut.

The total gamut size will vary depending on the printing technology and factors including the kind of paper being used. But I can tell you that you can't just decide on some arbitrary precision.

The number of bits is defined by the output device itself. Does it take 8 bit data? And is it really only a 4 color CMYK? Or is it a 6 or 8 color model? These are the key factors, and you can't dismiss them. If you ignore the K channel, and then make the assumption that you can use all values at the same time for the remaining three, then you'd have at least colors.

Except again, it's a bit meaningless without the knowledge of the device limitations, LUT, etc. Knowing if the gamut of what you see on your display, or in photoshop, is going to print without being clipped or mangled.

But ProPhoto uses imaginary primaries that can not exist in the real world, so even if you are using 16 bit in ProPhoto RGB, you are not getting ,,,, colors because many of the colors do not even exist in reality.

Not to mention that Photoshop only uses 15 bits of 16 bit images, so to start you're already down to 35,,,,