Why do printers have CMYK ink instead of RYB & black ink?

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Why do printers have CMYK ink instead of RYB & black ink?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

[Here is a color wheel showing many pigments used in painting and printing.](https://painterfactory.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-discussions-components-files/19/cwheel06sfsfsfsfs.png) Roughly speaking, if you draw a shape using your chosen pigments, you will be able to make all the colors in that shape, but not out of that shape.

If you draw a triangle around benzimida yellow, quinacridone megenta and pthalo cyan, you will see that your greens, oranges and violets will not be very saturated.

Any three hues is a big compromise, but RBY is an unusually bad choice, because Red and Yellow are close to each other, leaving only B to cover everything from violets to magentas to greens.

In reality, even three ‘normal’ pigments like ultramarine, cadmium red and hansa yellow will be able to reproduce 99% of the colors you see. Very saturated colors are not common. A big reason why people teach color mixing with RBY is that it is easy to control the value of a mixture using yellow and blue since yellow is intrinsically light and blue is intrinsically dark. Good artists can rapidly mix almost any non-saturated color in their environment using these colors.

If you want the biggest color ‘space’ also called a ‘gamut’ you need to choose as many pigments from the periphery of this graph as possible.

Note also that there are not a ton of good options for very saturated green yellows and violets. I am not sure why this is the case, but these colors will potentially be more saturated coming from an emmissive source.

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