How do the Printers Print All Color?

Printers printing color happens in a two-stage process. 

The first process is translating/ transmitting the information from the digital display of the PC to a format suitable for the printer.  After you press print on your computer and involves a lot of transmutation of file types.  The digital display on the PC sees color as (RGB) Red, Green and Blue are additive colors.  Because any color type is formed by the addition of these colors in different proportions. While the colors in most printers are (CYMK) Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black are subtractive colors. Because colors are subtracting parts of the white spectrum of light

How to Print Color

Most contemporary PCs and printers communicate with the Hewlett Packard’s Printer Command Language (PCL) and Adobe’s Postscript. Both of these languages describe the page in vector form.  The printer takes these instructions and develops a bitmap page, which is the format the printer can make the best use of the CYMK color set that the printer uses.   

Finally, after the printer understands the instructions, the 2nd stage of the process involves the mixing of the colors in the printer to get the desired color.  A brief explanation of the colors. The printer store color apart from black are secondary colors. They are transparent colors. The addition of any two of these secondary colors gives one of the primary colors.  In fact, it achieve any color by the mixture of any of these three colors.  The mixing of the color is guided by printer software sending instructions to controllers.  The physical process of mixing the colors happens in different ways for various types of printers. For some printer types, the page sheet goes through one pass of each of the different colors in the CYMK. With the color spectrum achieved based on the mixture of the proportions instructed by the controllers.

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