Hey, everyone.  I'm sitting on the floor so that  I can try a slightly different lighting setup,  so hopefully I'm well lit.  This video was going to be Color Theory Two,  except that when I was writing it out loud,  it kind of stopped being about color theory  and started being more about  pre-press production for printing,  which is a completely different subject  from RGB color processes  and what I talked about in my last video.  Keep on watching because it's...  Nah, I'll let Jason Monday sing it to you.  ? Keep on watching  ? It's time for Karen Kavett now ?  So, CMYK.  CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key.  Not black, which is a common misconception.  It's called this because the cyan,  magenta, and yellow printing plates  are all aligned against the key black plate.  Basically when you make a large run  of printed material you have a different plate for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.  I put a link in the description  to a short video that shows a printing press in action,  so if you go watch that maybe it'll  make a little more sense.  If you remember from my last video,  the CMYK color model is subtractive.  Since you begin with a white surface  and you subtract brightness from it,  once you start putting ink down.  If you look really closely at a magazine  or some other mass produced printed material,  you'll notice that the imagery is made up  of tiny little cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots.  This is called halftone printing  and since ink is semi-transparent,  when you start layering those colors on top of each other,  they make the full spectrum of the rainbow.  When you're printing, you want to make sure  that you always set your images to be CMYK and not RGB.  Let's say you're trying to print  this lovely photo of Michael Buckley.  The screen can render those  bright reds and greens beautifully,  but a printer isn't going to be able to.  Colors look completely different in print  than they do on the screen,  and it's better to find that out early  or else you're in for a very unpleasant surprise.  When you're preparing documents for print,  you want to be aware of your bleed area and your trim line.  The trim line is where the printer  is going to cut the paper.  But if you want the image  to go all the way to the edge of the paper,  you'll have to leave a bleed of 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch.  That way if the paper ends up shifting a little,  the image won't just stop,  leaving you with a really ugly white line  on the edge of your paper.  You'll also have to leave a bleed  if you're planning on having your project die cut,  which it when it's cut into a fancy shape by a machine.  This Yule Ball invitation  from the Harry Potter Film Wizardry book  is an example of some pretty intricate die cuts.  Let's talk about DPI.  DPI stands for dots per inch,  and it's basically how many pixels  are printed on each inch of the paper.  Images saved for the web are usually 72 DPI,  but if you're printing a book or a poster,  it'll only need to be somewhere around 300.  This is why if you find a small image off the internet  and you try to print it,  it'll come out really pixelated,  because the pixel information you need  for a high-quality print just isn't there.  You can change the DPI in Photoshop  by going to image size and then changing the resolution.  And if you uncheck "Resample image,"  then you can change the DPI  without changing any of the pixel dimensions.  One thing you have to consider with DPI though  is what distance you're viewing the object from.  Basically the farther away you are,  the lower the DPI has to be.  While images in a book need to be at least 300,  a billboard could get away with something like 20 DPIs  since you're so far away from it.  Now let's get back to color and look at the difference  between plain black and rich black.  With CMYK there are two ways that you can make black.  First, you could just use black ink,  which is called plain black.  Or, you could layer cyan, magenta, and yellow  right on top of each other  and then put black on top of that,  which gives you rich black.  Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign,  programs like that have their own ratios  for what makes rich black.  You don't want to just set all four values to be 100  because then you'll just have way too much ink on the paper.  So when do you use plain black versus rich black?  For large blocks of text,  you'll want to stick with plain black  because if any of the printing plates  are a little bit misaligned,  then all of your text will end up with a colored shadow.  But for an image or a large area  where you really want a deep, dark black  then rich black is the way to go.  I guess this is a little more about colors  than I had thought it would be.  Okay, let's talk about spot colors and Pantone colors.  Spot colors are a specific color  that you want to be printed besides CMYK.  For example, a very specific red or green.  The print shop will mix up a separate ink  and it'll have its own plate.  Obviously the more spot colors you have,  the more expensive the job ends up being.  Pantone is the brand that makes the Pantone Matching System.  This is a standardized set of thousands of colors of ink,  all of which are numbered  so that you can tell a printer, anywhere in the country,  to use, say, PMS 130,  and it will always turn out the exact same color  no matter what it looks like on your screen.  Pantone also makes metallic and neon inks  and so you can start getting really fancy,  outside of just CMYK.  Okay, finally let's talk about  different file types and what they all mean.  There are two types of files: raster and vector.  A raster file is made up of pixels,  like a JPEG or a PNG.  Vector means that it's made of mathematical formulas  and so it can be scaled as big as you want  without losing any quality.  Adobe Illustrator files are a vector files,  and when you export a PDF from Illustrator,  that's also a vector file.  One thing to remember though,  if you're printing from a vector file,  you'll want to make sure to make outlines  of all your text and to expand  all of your strokes and effects.  That way there's less of a chance  of a compatibility problem if the print shop  doesn't have all your fonts  or if they have a different version of Illustrator.  You'll need to talk to your print shop  about what kind of file they want specifically.  They might want your Photoshop or Illustrator file  so that they can export it exactly  to their own specifications.  Those types of files can get really big though,  so you might just send it PDF,  which is a much smaller file and can embed fonts.  You usually won't be printing from a JPEG  just because of the loss in qualities,  since it's compressed so much,  and that's why it's such a small file.  And TIF is another type of image file often used  for printing since it doesn't compress information.  Again though, that can become a really big file,  so make sure you ask your print shop  what they need specifically.  If you're just printing photos on your desktop printer,  you probably won't need most of this information.  But when you're going to professional print shops  to get hundreds or thousands of the same thing made,  this information will save the print shop employees  a lot of time getting your files ready to print.  And it'll save you money from having to get it all redone  when it doesn't come out the way you wanted.  Good luck and let me know in the comments  if you have any questions.  Also let me know if there are any subjects  related to graphic design  that you want me to make  a tutorial video, like this, about.  I'll see you guys next time.  (upbeat rock music)