How are colors printed? Printed colors differ from monitor colors in that they're produced by overlaying ink pigments on paper instead of by combining different wavelengths. If however you were to try red green , and blue on the of the another, you wouldn't be able to produce very many colors. You wouldn't be able to make yellow, for instance. This is why printing inks work using subtractive color mixing, which we'd like to introduce to at this point. Imagine that a surface printed magenta and cyan is illuminated by normal daylight can be thought of as composed of equally bright red, green, and blue rays of light. If this white light strikes a colored surface, the surface absorbs the complementary colors from the light and reflects the rest.	Printing with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black Printing with Red, Green and Blue
	Our surface was printed with equal parts of cyan and magenta. Cyan's complementary color is red, while magenta's complementary color is green. With the subtraction of the absorbed, complementary colors, all that's left is blue. Theoretically, if we were to print a surface with equal parts of cyan, magenta, yellow, we's see black, because all colors would be absorbed and reflected. In practice, however, this black looks more like a muddy green or brown. That's why for colors are generally used in printing (you may heard the expression "four-color print"). Black is used as the fourth color in order to achieve a real black. Thus, a normal four-color print is produced by a CMYK basis (CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black).

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