Inspiring

Question

Illustrator - Best practices for managing logo color for web and print versions.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 15, 2025
2 replies
2293 views

I'll start by saying that I'm a beginner. I'm looking for suggestions on best practices for setting up the workflow for designing a logo for use on the web and for traditional printing.

In my specific case, I'm facing a problem regarding colors. To decide which color or colors to adopt, I take inspiration from the colors and examples available on the web. So, RGB colors.

Questions:

1) How do I convert RGB values to CMYK while preserving the color chosen in the RGB profile.

2) Illustrator warns when an RGB or CMYK color is outside the Gamut of the set profile. I also get the same warning with the RGB profile and the Web gamut. So, what should I pay attention to and how important are these warnings?

How-to

Jacob Bugge

Community Expert

Arturo,

Fundamentally, the range of colours is narrower in (plain) CMYK than in RGB, (especially) including brighter/more stunning colours.

You can see a bit about the fundamental differences,

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rgb+vs+cmyk+gamut&t=ftsa&atb=v320-1&ia=web

If you wish consistent colours, the safe way, as recommended in the old days, is to start out with CMYK colours.

But maybe things have moved so much into the bright(er) world of (RGB) screens that the appearance of (plain CMYK) print has a dwindling importance, so that many will settle for a certain resemblance, maybe using extended gamut printing for more important prints.

You can read a bit about extended gamut printing,

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=extended+gamut+printing&t=ftsa&atb=v320-1&ia=web

Edit: And what Ton said while I was still at it.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

1) How do I convert RGB values to CMYK while preserving the color chosen in the RGB profile.

You cannot in most cases, RGB has a wider gamut than CMYK, so when converting RGB to CMYK you limit the colors to what is possible in CMYK.

It would be better to start with a CMYK document and convert those colors to RGB by pasting them into an RGB document.

2) Illustrator warns when an RGB or CMYK color is outside the Gamut of the set profile. I also get the same warning with the RGB profile and the Web gamut. So, what should I pay attention to and how important are these warnings?

The top warning shows the CMYK equivalent for the selected color. If you click it, it will bring it into the current CMYK profile gamut, but it is still an RGB color.

The bottom one can be ignored, it comes from the time that monitors could only display 256 colors.

A

Arturo266834390dbmAuthor

Inspiring

@Jacob Bugge

Thanks to both of you for your support.

Please confirm that the following reasoning is correct.

1) After opening the post I changed the default settings in Color Setting. The screenshot shows the new settings.

2) I created a new file with the RGB color profile, see screenshot below. I chose a sample color, the first from the left. The color panel shows two alerts represented by two icons for each alert arranged on two rows.

Questions related to point 2:
In each alert, the first icon on the left indicates the type of alert?,
The second icon shows the preview of the color proposed by Illustrator?

Does the alert on the first row concern the sRGB profile or the RGB profile?
Is the alert on the second row related to the RGB or CMYK gamut?

3) I copied the sample color into the file with the CMYK color profile used to design the logo. The color changed becoming like the 2nd color on the right. So, this should answer the question related to point 2 i.e., the out of gamut warning is referred to the CMYK profile even if it appears in a document with RGB color profile?

But if I set a color that goes outside the RGB gamut, does illustrator show a specific warning?

Many thanks

A

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

"But if I set a color that goes outside the RGB gamut, does illustrator show a specific warning?"

You cannot specify an RGB color in an RGB document that goes outside the gamut of that RGB profile.

You can specify CMYK colors in an RGB document, like 100% Cyan, that goes outside the gamut, but they will be converted to the nearest possible RGB equivalent.

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