To my knowledge, there is actually a pretty important additional reason why black is necessary: Our Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow inks are imperfect, and combining them can't actually quite reach black on their own.
Yup, also why fancier printing processes will have more inks to get closer to the desired colors. E.g. home inkjet printers can have 10 tanks, and professional printers will mix up specific colors to match the brand's colors.
@@Dustmix they're obviously more expensive than a conventional CMYK inkjet, hence not much consumer interest. compared to industrial machines that take up a large room though they're not much larger than a conventional printer
And there's different K's as well. K is also used to not oversaturate the medium you print on, because things can only take up so much ink. Newspaper for example can't take up much at all, while thicker paper can usually take up a good bit more, and then you can add a bit of CMY to get a darker black.
Also RGBW does exist. If you are searching for more efficient LEDs you'll probably find them. They use a white LED in the same way black is used with cmyk. It's pretty cool!
They also tend to produce white light better than standard RGB. RGB LEDs by themselves, especially cheaper ones, tend to produce a white with a blue tinge, because blue LEDs tend to be the brightest. If you have a white LED, then you can produce a proper pure white.
@@The14Some1 because rgb is additive, and cmyk is subtractive. also 'black light' doesn't exist. imagine an rgb led, but with all of the diodes turned off for example
I believe there's also an analog for CMY and CMYK with RGB where some RGB LEDs will also have a white LED to get a truer white. (Oh my, that's a lot of acronyms)
Some applications of RGB light actually do have the additional White channel - see for example all decent-good RGB smart bulbs. They have this extra white channel as colored LEDs are usually significantly more dim than white ones, so the extra White LED can turn on to boost the brightness when applicable.
This is one of the best explanations of a concept that I have ever seen. Just something about using a minecraft/voxel model that works mathematically and visually is so pleasing and simple.
This feels like a revalation i just randomly found this video and everything just made sense and i love the color coordinates XYZ for CMY and K is just all units to 1 moving it diagonal. and how it's effective in a real world senario of printing. never owned a printer but damn does it make me want one after this video.
I had the same kind of ah ha moment when I was making it, everything clicked. Color is not a topic that I am an expert on, but have some experience and just interest me. I have learned quite a bit having to research making these videos.
So cool to see color theory taught in minecraft- and it makes so much more sense than it did before! funnily enough, there's an application in minecraft for color blending along pretty similar lines using glass, and i wonder if it works the same way with CMYK. will mess around with it for sure! ...update, thanks to colors having unqual priorities, it doesn't work. would have been cool though! some aspects probably still hold true.
Wouldn't replacing the 6 CMY units with 2 K units result in a less dark colour? Since mixing 6 CMY irl makes 6 K, there is no loss of matter. If we replace that with only 2 K, the ratio will change, resulting in a lighter mix. I think it's more because black ink is usually far cheaper than colored. It would cost less to get originally black ink than to make it yourself by mixing colours.
Wouldn't you just scale all ink volumes to reach the necessary volume? The color os only defined by the proportion of each component inside it. You can make half as much of the dinal color by using half as much of every component. I'm a little confused now because in digital colors, half of each component results in a way darker color...
This isn't totally correct. Yes, when spraying thin layers of paints on top of eachother, it is effectively subtractive color mixing (almost), but if you blend colors together like blenidng blue and yellow to get green, that is no longer a good representation of what color you can expect to get irl. Using subtractive color mixing, you get an ugly green-ish brown, gray or a dark teal depending on the implementation. Nowhere close to a vivid green
Oh yeah.. Nearly forgot about that account. I'll probably be setting up a discord when i get back from australia. For now you could message me on reddit (gneiss-name), or email me, address on my about tab here.
Unfortunately the human memory exists, there's a limit to how much info you can hold it at a given time. But you can counteract this by just checking your sources when in doubt, always write stuff down kids.
unfortunately many things are taught this well, except that there are numerous different teaching and learning styles, and many people are unable or struggle to adapt their learning style to different methods of teaching. i wish my lack of knowledge god status was because things arent taught well
this remembered me when I had to do the same colour mixing for a project on arts, I was confused at first because I thought I needed the clasical red yellow blue to get other colours but turned out it also worked with CMYK so I got surprised, now that I understand a bit more about colors and stuff I understood better how it works so thank you ^^
@@kelpgaming6995 cyan and magenta are their own separate hues from blue and red though, and their distinction from ryb lets cmyk more accurately represent a wider range of colors.
I read that ink isn't purely subtractive. It's somewhere between subtractive and averaging mixing. So mixing cmy will just give you a dark gray or brown but not black. It's because some light just hits the surface of the ink and bounces immediately back without getting both sets of frequencies absorbed by both pigments.
That's also true for RGB devices as the spectrum given off isn't a specific set of 3 wavelengths, but rather 3 ranges. That creates issues when mixing and throws off the color. This is why displays have to be calibrated and the rgb values you send to the screen get gamma corrected before they are displayed.
This video explains something in the most intuitive way i have seen for any video ever. I can't explain how satisfying it felt watching this video just because of it being explained so simply. Well done.
I would also add that in practice, widout the black ink, you can't really achieve a black colour by mixing the other ones, you get a dark grey. That's because when you mix inks, the particles or each of them occupy space that isn't absorbing the other colours.
@@The14Some1 Red Green Blue White It has a “white” so it can have brighter colours/tones instead of K (key/toner) which basically means “dimmer” to make the colour more dark. Key makes sense though.
I feel like this video shouldn't have "Minecraft" in its title. It's got nothing to do with it, and explains the subtractive color-space pretty well in the context of printers.
Ah yeah, the Red-yellow-blue colour system you learned in kindergarten and used all the way through school and for your entire life so far is completely wrong btw. Red and blue aren't even primary colours with paint mixing, they're secondary because red can be made my mixing magenta and yellow, and blue can be made by mixing cyan and magenta.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we don't actually save the amount of ink we're using, but rather the amount of coloured (more expensive) ink. I would imagine that, for every coloured "dot" on the paper, we use the same amount of ink but to achieve different colours we're just changing the composition of the ink we're using.
That, though, doesn't take away from the video. I actually don't know how it works and didn't understand CYMK before this, so thank you so much for this simple and concise explanation!
this is such a genius way to visualize color space and CMYK and ink volume! I'm almost imagining some redstone shenanigans that retract three CMY blocks and push out a black cube XD
I’m a printer, I find it interesting using a 3d space to explain cmyk, it’s actually quite genius. Just a thing about black, it’s not really used to save colour, perhaps on a home printer? but its more for colour accuracy
i used to work with printers and i was always told the k in cmyk stood for blacK to not be confused with the B on blue and i just rolled with it lol, this makes much more sense
CMYK is so finicky. I've recently printed books for a Typography and Visual Communication class at my Uni, and the amount of trial and error, slight tweaking of the colours in InDesign and Illustrator I've had to do, just to reach the pantone colours I wanted (I was aiming to achieve the same colour as my department has) was astounding. Best thing is I straight up asked my professor what values are in this specific yellow and she told me - 100% yellow and 20% magenta. It did not match even in the slightest. It did on my final presentation boards first try, but that combination of paper and printer that was used to dish out the books just did not go hand in hand. CMYK is a mess
Sorry if this is an ignorant question, but if that color is 4 parts Cyan, 2 parts yellow, and 2 parts black, can't you divide them all by 2 and get the same color? 2 parts cyan, 1 part yellow, 1 part black? why does that give us a different color on the 3D color space?
Good question and I think I have an OK explanation. You would get the same ratio of colors and it would be the same hue but it would be different tint. This specific color we are making is for a specific area. If we have less paint but still need to cover the same area, and we are assuming a white background, there will be less coverage and the color will be lighter. If we think about it from the RGB color space have you have 50% of red green and blue, you get middle grey, if you divided it by 5 you will have the same ratio and color, its just darker.
if you did CMYRGBK, you could save even more ink by compressing C+M into B, M+Y into R, and Y+C into G. is this not done because it just ends up being too complicated, too many different types of ink?
Yeah, you can definitely add more colors into the mix, I have a large format plotter at work that uses 6 colors and I know HP makes one that uses 10 cartridges.
@@gneissname ah, so it's done but it's just fancy lol i'd imagine it increases the accessibility of highly saturated colors as well, in addition to using less ink
One thing I'm wondering is how to get the Gamut shape of CMYK in the chromaticity diagram. For additive models, it's obvious - it's just the polygon spanned by the primary colors. But CMYK is a hexagon, and I can't find anything about how to calculate the positions of the three vertices that aren't cyan, magenta, and yellow.
Its just a resource pack I made. I retextured the CMYK concrete just for this video. The other primary saturated colors are retextured candles, that resource pack is in the 1.20 color world description.
Hey Gneiss i hope you see this, i think you would LOVE the Create mod, i would definitely recommend trying it out (i know it untelated but i wanted to put this on your most recent video for you to see this), btw i love your videos, amazing youtuber!
Hey Marco, I'm sure I would. Its very tempting to play, but I worry it would consume all of my time. I still may do it just to mess around a bit though. I haven't even played 1.20 yet on my survival world. My backlog of other games is getting out of hand now too.
@gneissname dont worry take your time, i just thought it would be something you could have fun with, have a wonderful day and i hope you can take care of that backlog XD
