RGB vs CMYK: Colour Spaces for Web and Print

RGB and CMYK are not two ways of writing the same colours — they are different sets of colours, which is why print never quite matches screen.

RGB is additive

Screens emit light: red, green and blue add together, and all three at full intensity make white. sRGB is the standard web colour space and what every browser assumes unless told otherwise.

CMYK is subtractive

Ink absorbs light. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black subtract from white paper, and all four together make a muddy near-black — which is why printing uses a separate black plate.

The gamut problem

CMYK cannot reproduce the bright saturated blues, greens and oranges that a screen can. Converting RGB to CMYK necessarily dulls those colours, and no setting avoids it — it is a physical limit of ink.

Which formats carry CMYK

TIFF, PSD, EPS and PDF do. JPG technically can. PNG, GIF, AVIF and WebP do not — WebP is sRGB, 8-bit, full stop.

What this means practically

WebP is a web format and should never enter a print pipeline. If work is print-bound, keep a TIFF or PDF master in CMYK with the right ICC profile and generate WebP only for the web preview.
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