What is the difference between process blue and cyan

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Because of her lack of knowledge of the color spaces and the technical jargon which printers use, did she mistakenly think they meant that Blue and Cyan are the same color? My best guess would be the people she was around were using inaccurate terminology, but everyone "knew what it meant" and it was simply never corrected. For example, around here, we have digital presses, and when someone says "blue ink" I know they mean Cyan, because there is no blue ink available for those machines.

Magenta became "red" in the same fashion. I just gave up saying anything. The wiki link above has a good explanation of it. Blue is blue. Cyan is blue green mix. Most definately NOT the same. Yellow-magenta-cyan are subtractive primary colors Red- green blue are additive primaries. Printers therefore often speak of "process colors": process-blue cyan , process-red magenta , process-yellow oddly enough, yellow , and, of course, process-black.

There is no process-green. I imagine they get tired of saying "process" all the time and just shorten it down. If you take 2 floodlights, one with a blue gel filter, the other with a green, and play their lights on a white wall so that they overlap, the overlap will be cyan. Add a 3rd floodlight, with a red gel filter, overlap all 3, the overlap will be white.

You can arrange the colors like a Star of David:. This looks better:. That said, in practice most printing cyans I've seen seem to be significantly more blue than green.

I agree. I suspect that in the printing industry concentrated cyan dye looks dark blue but as Mendel has shown very clearly they are NOT the same.

JeffOwen , Mar 20, The addition of any two primaries red, green, or blue , invariably produces a "brighter" secondary. Add the third primary, and you've got brightest white.