For years, the golden rule in print design has been “Always design in CMYK.” The reasoning was sound — offset printers run on cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks, and converting from RGB to CMYK at the last minute could cause unexpected shifts in colour. But here’s the thing:
Digital printing has changed the game.
With today’s advanced digital presses and wide format printers boasting expanded inksets — often including orange, green, violet, red, light cyan, light magenta, and even fluorescent, metallic or white inks — sticking to the traditional CMYK workflow may actually limit your results, not improve them.
CMYK: A Narrow Slice of What’s Possible
Let’s put the technical stuff about additive vs subtractive colours aside for a minute… CMYK was developed to reproduce colours using the smallest number of inks needed to simulate full colour. It’s efficient and predictable for offset printing — but inherently restrictive.
Converting to CMYK early in the process clips colours. Saturated blues, electric greens, vibrant reds — all those colours you see on screen in RGB? CMYK can’t match them. If you start in CMYK, you’re voluntarily narrowing your colour palette before you even get to the printer.
That made sense in a purely offset world. But most digital printers today use 6 to 12 ink colours, capable of producing a much wider gamut than standard CMYK. So why are we still designing for a limitation that may not exist?
RGB Is Not “Just for Screen”
One of the biggest misconceptions is that RGB is only for screens, and CMYK is for print. But let’s break that down:
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RGB = Wide Gamut. It contains all the colours your monitor can display — and far more than CMYK can print.
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Our RIP (Raster Image Processor) software will detect the file’s colour space and map colours intelligently to the printer’s specific inkset at the very last stage, often producing better results than CMYK conversions.
- Oh and an added bonus – RGB files are smaller than CMYK.
The Case for RGB: Let the Printer Do the Work
If you’re working with a trusted digital print provider who understands colour management and uses ICC profiles, the best practice is often to:
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Design in RGB.
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Keep colours in wide-gamut spaces like Adobe RGB.
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Export as high-res PDF, preserving your RGB data.
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Let the RIP do the final colour conversion, using the printer’s ICC profile.
This approach maintains colour integrity for as long as possible, allowing the printer to leverage the full capabilities of the inkset.
So When Should You Use CMYK?
CMYK still matters — here’s when to use it:
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If you’re printing on an offset press using standard 4-colour process.
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If you need precise control over specific colour separations that can’t be included in an RGB workspace, such as spot colours.
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If your brand will be produced across a wide range of print formats then you may wish to design in CMYK even for digital printing to bring everything down to the lowest common denominator in terms of colour gamut.
But for most digital printing scenarios printed on modern machines — RGB is not only acceptable, it will give you a better result.
Final Thought
Designing in CMYK is no longer a universal best practice — it’s a legacy workflow that doesn’t reflect what modern printers can do. If your print partner is using digital presses with expanded inksets and their RIP software is handling colour conversions, you’ll get the best results by supplying an RGB file that hasn’t had its colours prematurely clipped.
Print has come a long way. It’s time our file prep habits caught up.
