Thank you very much! This answers a lot of my questions–I had, for a long time, thought I was doing something wrong and felt incompetent as an artist because of this same reason. My prints were always off-color when I printed from home! But with this information, I feel more confident that I’ll be able to find some sort of solution. Thank you again.

• You should always print CMYK, even at home. Unless your printer is specified as RGB it is using CMY, which can only produce certain colors when mixed. There are RGB printers though that are ideal for photo printing. But in the end most printers, even those at home, are CMYK.

• When buying a printer don’t think about the initial cost as much as the cost of the ink. A rule of thumb is that the cheaper the printer the more expensive the ink. Companies make the money on the ink, why do you think they just hand printers out on a whim. Another thing to think about is getting a printer that has a cartridge for EACH color. 2 cartridge printers, black and color, will need you to replace the color cartridge if just one well runs out. Just some tips.

• As for color space I would highly recommend switching to Adobe RGB. Though your monitor is most likely a sRGB (there ARE non sRGB monitors with much better color range) you will still see a difference. You will have a much higher range of colors and in it turn will have more control. Even if someone looks at it in sRGB it will look better. A thing to remember though is that most monitors are sRGB so when you are working in CMYK or Adobe RGB it is being represented as best as possible in the sRGB color space. LAB will give you an even HIGHER range of color.

Color space diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colorspace.png (the matte paper is similar to the CMYK color space.

Again I love your work and site and I really don’t mean to lecture. I hope this helps at all :)

CMYK or RGB, Mac or PC, and LCD monitors or CRT monitors. I found experimentation to be the best tool, but I think this clears up a lot of what I found out in the past. Printing my stuff out always looked like it did on the screen. But I was told to use CMYK. I’m an amateur so I never had to make anything for print, but even I know CMYK is the best option for that, but ignored it for my own stuff. Thanks for clearing up on why my stuff looked as it did even though it was RGB

Plus for you all Manga artists there. A black and white laser printer is the best for printing all those half tone patterns. I’ve tried it once on an Inkjet and got a lot of inconsistence in the patterns, but a b/w laser is made to handle all the little detail. And of course printing 600 dpi documents is a breeze.

Thank you for this article. It’s of much help.

I’m curious though and want to ask you, when you say you always work in RGB when doing digital paintings, do you work with Proof Color on (Photoshop menu bar View>Proof Colors)? Or do you work in RGB, and then convert to CMYK for the client without Proof color on?

Much appreciated :)