This perfect color reference book, recognized by experts and associations, shows you absolutely exact colors. The 5% gradations up to the halftones give you essential color nuances that allow you to determine even the finest color differences that cannot be seen on the screen. This enables you to make even more precise color corrections when scanning and thus improve the print results even further with the help of the DCS book. DCS book C+M+Y+K: 256 color charts with a total of 65,536 color references printed on matt coated art paper. In February you will receive the HKS K fan free of charge as an introductory gift.
• Delivery in a high-quality ring binder with 6-fold mechanism in a light-protected slipcase
• Comprehensive foreword on the subject of color, color reproduction and printing
• Detailed instructions for use
• Color and grayscale images displayed in 10 screen sizes
• Grayscale (K) and color scale (C, M, Y, K) patterns in 10% steps and in 10 screen widths
The color fields of the DCS Book show which color will result for a certain combination of CMYK tonal values on the data set (or film) when printed under standard conditions on a good (double-coated) art paper (matt or glossy). The details of screen fineness, screen angle, printing plate, printing machine, and type of printing paper are irrelevant for color matching. What is important are the printing characteristics (characterized by the increase in tonal value in the midtone) and the color locations of the CMYK and RGB solid tones.
If you work with the program "Adobe Photoshop", for example, you can query the CMYK values at any point in the image in CMYK mode. If the monitor is set up correctly with color management, it should show the same color as the DCS book; the corresponding color field is easy to find due to the simple organization of the book. However, screens that are not particularly adapted will only show approximately the correct color.
Conversely, you can use the DCS Book to find out which CMYK combination you need to use to "create" a desired color so that it is produced on the printing paper using the offset process under the conditions mentioned. To do this, you use the cardboard masks included with the DCS Book; if possible, you should work with standard light. It may turn out that a color is so intensely colorful that it cannot be produced using the usual offset process; it is then logically not included in the DCS Book. Very bright colors are best looked for first in the part of the DCS Book that is printed without black (K=0). Then you look at the corresponding panels with increasing black content to see if the same color can be found there. For colors that are not completely pure, such as brown, olive and of course gray, there are a whole range of CMYK combinations for one color that lead to the same color impression. These differ in their proportion of black printing ink (K). Combinations with a high proportion of K are particularly suitable for printing, since the color produced in this way is particularly little affected by fluctuations in the printing process.
