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Best practice for RGB logos

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
May 16, 2019
6 replies
8655 views

Forgive me if this is a silly question, but what is the best practice for creating an RGB version of a logo that has been designed in CMYK?

I have recently been promoted to manager of my small design team, and am reviewing some of the processes that the previous manager was in charge of. I've found that a lot of the RGB logos in the asset libraries are visibly different from their CMYK counterparts. This would not surprise me if the CMYK versions looked dull, but instead it seems like they have been correctly designed for print (the primary medium) but converted afterwards to RGB colours that don't perfectly match. Sometimes this makes the RGB versions look "off", like warm yellows becoming slightly greenish, while others are just a bit washed out and flat.

I suspect part of the reason may be that he had been trying to use "web-safe" colours, but am not sure if this practice is still necessary with technology where it is. Also at least one of the logos has an RGB version that is not web-safe either.

I don't know if I've been doing it correctly all this time, but when I convert from CMYK to RGB in Illustrator, I just change the document colour mode and then create a new swatch, changing its colour mode from CMYK to RGB and letting Illustrator choose the closest equivalent.

Can someone shed light on the (current) best practice for this? I've only ever encountered problems trying to convert RGB backwards to CMYK so this is new to me and a bit puzzling.

cmyk to rgb

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Correct answer Danny Whitehead.

These guidelines are years old and all the people who had anything to do with them are long gone. I did try to question the previous manager about it when I was working under him, but his answers usually along the lines of "that's just how it is so why change it". However we'll be looking to update the guidelines in the near future and I'm wondering if this is a good time to address the issue of the murky colours.

nryan.design wrote
However we'll be looking to update the guidelines in the near future and I'm wondering if this is a good time to address the issue of the murky colours.

It absolutely is!

I'd start with Pantone's Lab values for the coated versions of those colours, and convert to sRGB for the RGB values. For the CMYK values, I'd convert them to the most appropriate CMYK profile (based on your spelling of 'colour', I'd go for PSO Coated/FOGRA51, and PSO Uncoated/FOGRA52 for uncoated paper). You might then want to tweak them a little to get rid of 1% dots etc. But bear in mind that as Bobby said, CMYK is a moving target, and despite lingering misconceptions, those values will only ever have limited 'authority'.

Lukas Engqvist

Community Expert

Actually yellows are at a point of the colour gamut, and they may go lime green. Also many cyan tones are not reproducible in standard RGB monitors. The missmatch in the whitepoint will also affect the distortion. This has to do with the shape of the colour spaces. (If you want pure yellows in RGB you will need to use ECI RGB or similar, but that will not work for web). Chaning the hue to the warmer you may been to sacrifice some intensity but it will usually give a better result. Colour is so much judged in context and it really depends on too many factors to give a simple answer. Setting colour settings to General purpose settings and using global swatches to manage colours more easily is the only advice for managing this.

Image of RGB and how it both exceeds and is smaller than CMYK at different colours (sRGB vs FOGRA39 using Color Sync utility) Remember colour space is 3dimensional, often comparison charts only show it 2 dimensional

Note that if original colours are in Pantone (Lab) you may be seeing the Spot colour simulation and not the CMYK simulation.

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Test Screen Name

Legend

If it looks okay to us, but bad to you, consider if your colour management and screen calibration needs attention.

Peter Villevoye

Community Expert

Colors on your (RGB) screen can have a much larger range of brightness and saturation, compared to colors in ordinary (CMYK) print. Any brilliant RGB color stated, or rendered, or converted into CMYK will probably lose some of that brilliance. So once the RGB colors are converted CMYK numbers, it's hard to tell what the original color might have been...

Imagine all possible colors schematically as a sphere, or presented as a flat circle. (Scientifically it's more like a 3D blob in a three-axis model, but let's keep it simple for the sake of the explanation.) The brightest colors in the outer range of the sphere will be 'truncated' to the nearest possible color in print, which is less brilliant, more dull...

(The hole in the middle indicates the fact that the brightest and pure white tints will also be replaced by the tint of the paper stock.)

If you're sure the original RGB colors were much brighter, and you want to bring that brilliance back, you'll need to edit their numbers (in RGB) manually, or you could consider giving them a boost using the Color Editing dialogue in Illustrator:

Use the yellow highlighted levels to bring back some brightness and saturation.

Note: switch the chain icon to on, in order to change colors simultaneously.

nryan_designAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for your reply Peter, but my issue is not about conversion from RGB to CMYK, but the opposite direction. The CMYK values look beautiful and we have very few problems (we primarily use the logo in print and I think that's what they were designed for). The RGB logos on the other hand look so "off" to me that I basically never use them unless I absolutely can't avoid it.

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Do any of the logos have any kind of specific reference colors? CMYK alone is kind of a moving target. Depending on the profiles being used it may print one way out of one printer and come out looking different when output from a different printer. The same applies when viewed on different monitors or even different graphics applications. Many logos will often use Pantone spot or process swatch color books as a visual target for color matching. RGB colors can be tweaked to more closely match what you see in a physical Pantone swatch book.

nryan_designAuthor

Inspiring

There are Pantone colours listed in the brand guidelines, although they haven't specified which book they are from so I'm just guessing that they are from the Solid Coated book. They don't help much with RGB though, since every screen will be different.

But the part that I'm finding strange is the CMYK colours below look so much richer and truer than the RGB counterparts that were chosen by whoever set up the brand guidelines. On the other hand, when I use Adobe's automatic conversion the numbers are different but it looks identical to the CMYK version (which makes sense). For example, Illustrator give me a blue of R=0, G=72, B=153 and an orange of R=239, G=123, B=5.

So is there any reason why different RGB values might have been used here? Or am I right to be finding it weird?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

You could ask them about it.

nryan_designAuthor

Inspiring

I should clarify that I have never had problems using the automatic conversion and am happy with the results when I use this method. It's the existing logos in the library that I'm scratching my head over. I'm hesitant to alter them in case there's some reason for them to be that way that I don't know about.

Is web-safe still a thing? I thought it wasn't really necessary anymore because the technology in users' device screens handle a lot more colours these days.