Colors adjusted on screen often don’t look that way when printed on paper; conversely, colors from printed materials moved directly to a web page often appear dull. This isn’t an operational mistake, but rather because the color rendering principles of the two media are fundamentally different.
Two ways of rendering color
A screen emits light. It creates colors by combining red, green, and blue light. The stronger the light, the brighter the color, and when combined to the extreme, it becomes white. This method can produce highly saturated colors; neon and fluorescent colors belong to this category. Printing reflects light. It relies on cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks layered on white paper. The more ink there is, the less light is reflected back, and the darker the color becomes, stacking to the extreme as black.
One is additive, and the other is subtractive. This determines that part of the color range a screen can display cannot be reproduced by ink. Conversely, some textures that printing can express have no corresponding expression on screen.
Where differences appear
The most obvious are highly saturated bright colors. Fluorescent green and bright purple on screen become noticeably darker when converted to print colors. Next are gradients and shadows; the delicate transitions on screen tend to show banding on paper. In addition, the paper’s own color and ink absorbency also affect the final result. The same file printed on different papers may turn out differently.
How to handle it when doing both online and offline
A relatively reliable approach is to prepare two sets of control methods from the start. The online part should be based on screen display, and the offline part should be based on a standard color card. The correspondence between the two should be written into the brand guidelines as a conversion reference. For materials with high color requirements, proofing is a step that cannot be skipped—the on-screen preview is only a reference, and only a proof before actual printing can reflect the real effect.
Spot colors require special attention. Some colors are printed separately with dedicated ink, achieving effects that four-color printing cannot, but the cost is higher, so they are usually used only for the brand’s primary colors.
Handling on the web side
Images on web pages should use a screen-oriented color mode; this is the most basic requirement. A common mistake is to upload the files used when designing printed materials directly, resulting in images that look gray on the web page. In addition, images can retain color profile information when exported, so they will display more similarly across different devices.
There is no way to completely eliminate color matching differences, but it can be turned into a controllable item in the process: online follows online standards, offline follows offline standards, and the two are connected by a clear set of relationships. Most color difference problems are caused by the process, not the technology.