Why do photos printed in full-color need to be colored CMYK?
Full-color printing is done by using the four CMYK colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) to make up the final colors. Therefore, the files we send to the press need to be made up only of those four colors. If we receive files colored in another way (mode), the conversion to CMYK is done by the computer by “making up” information to resemble a CMYK mix. Often, when a file is converted from another mode to CMYK, the colors change substantially. Most notably, when converting from RGB, the colors look “washed out”.
