CMYK and RGB are two common color modes, but their usage scenarios are quite different. The former is mainly used for printing, while RGB is mainly used for screen display. Depending on the actual use, sometimes it is necessary to switch between these two color modes, but some friends may wonder if cmyk to rgb will change color. Today, let's talk about these two topics.

 Will CMYK to RGB change color?

As shown in the figure below, the color gamut of RGB and CMYK is different, so whether it is CMYK to RGB or RGB to CMYK, there may be color changes. Of course, if all colors in the image are in the common area of these two color gamut, the converted image will not be distorted.

The difference between RGB and CMYK color gamut

 Why is there such a big difference in color gamut between these two color modes? The reason is that CMYK is composed of four colors, namely Cyan Magenta、Yellow、black。 Namely cyan, red, yellow, and black. In other words, CMYK is based on the principle of the three primary colors and incorporates black elements, resulting in higher quality CMYK.

How to keep the color unchanged when converting CMYK to RGB？

After converting CMYK to RGB, friends often find that the color of the converted image is generally much dimmer compared to the original image, and even shows obvious distortion. For friends who have high requirements for image quality, such distortion is unacceptable.

As shown in the figure below, the left side is RGB mode and the right side is CMYK mode, indicating significant distortion. Especially the sky in the left image is much dimmer than the sky in the right image. So, how to keep the color unchanged after converting CMYK to RGB? Now let's focus on solving this problem.

Image comparison

1. Click on "Tools>>Color Management>>Document Settings" on the menu bar.

Document Settings

In the pop-up "Document Color Settings" window, you can set the configuration of RGB and CMYK. Generally speaking, CMYK defaults to "Japan Color 2021". If you find that some colors in the default configuration are distorted, you can adjust individual colors or trigger external color configuration files. By focusing on and adjusting the distorted colors, you can try to keep the colors unchanged when converting RGB to CMYK.

Document color configuration

Change CMYK color configuration