Why do printers have CMYK ink instead of RYB & black ink?
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OK, I’ll try to give a true ELI5 explanation. It’s quite wordy, so bear with me.
Imagine that seeing colors is like playing ball. There’re 3 kinds of balls – red, green and blue. You can catch them separately – that would just give red, green and blue colors. You can catch them in pairs – it would give cyan, magenta and yellow colors. You can catch all three – getting the color white, and if you catch none – that would be black.
Now, screens have 3 very generous guys sitting in them – Red, Green and Blue. They have lifetime supplies of corresponding balls in their pockets and they’re ready to throw as much balls to you as you need. If you shout them “give me red” – the Red guy throws his ball. If you as for magenta – Red and Blue guys throw their balls to you. If you shout “I want white” – all three guys take action.
Each guy on the screen has his own position. They’re tiny, but if you look very closely you can actually see them individually. They **never** overlap.
Now, guys sitting in the paper are different. They have nothing in their pockets. They can only receive balls from somewhere else, take some and throw the rest back at you.
Imagine, that we use Red, Blue and Green guys on the paper. The Red guy receives three balls, takes blue and green and throws remaining red back at you, the Blue guys takes red and green balls, and throws blue one and the Green guy takes red and blue.
If you need magenta – you can put red and blue guys close together, like you do on the screen, and that would work.
But with paper we can actually do better! You see, on paper those guys **can** overlap – all three guys can take one spot on the field! At first that doesn’t seem that useful: if you put Red and Blue at one spot, the first will take blue and green balls and the second will take the remaining green. And you’ll receive nothing – color black. And any combination of those guys would produce the same result.
So, our RGB guys aren’t very cooperative on paper, aren’t they? But what if we swap them for different, more generous folks? Meet Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Cyan only wants red for himself, throwing blue and green balls back at you. Magenta only cares about green balls and Yellow only cares about the blue ones.
Now see what happens if we put Cyan and Magenta in one spot. Cyan takes the red ball, Magenta takes the green ball. And we receive the blue one that none of them wanted. Now we can get 8 different ball combinations from one spot:
1. red + green + blue (white color) — if we put no one
2. green + blue — Cyan guy
3. red + blue — Magenta guy
4. red + green — Yellow guy
5. red — Yellow + Magenta
6. green — Yellow + Cyan
7. blue — Magenta + Cyan
8. none — all the guys together
And that is the reason why we use CYM instead of RGB for the paper
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