[aprilcarter]

I have suggestions for anyone struggling with color:

At one of my old jobs, the overwhelming majority of our work was vector art. The standard procedure there was to use the following guidelines:

- Work in CMYK (even for items eventually becoming web art).
- Use only two of C, M, and Y when mixing colors.
- For shading, use the third of those... sparingly.
- Do not use K in colors.

While it was hard to get used to, eventually it became my own standard way of working.

What I used to color this way: The Old Way

I now color this way: The New Way

See them together: Color Comparison

What may look slightly different on-screen translates to great disparity on-press. My work has become crisper and cleaner looking in print since implementing this procedure, and I suggest trying it if you're skeptical.

[ultra-V]

Sounds like good guidelines, for colors that are saturated.

For muted colors on press, it's best to use black to dull the color rather than the third CMY. The colors will shift less on press. You know, when you're looking at a sheet at the printer and you take a little cyan out of something and all of a sudden your beiges elsewhere on the sheet go red? Well if you had used black to mute the beige instead of cyan, it wouldn't shift. It's also often good to make 4-screen colors (which tend to result from Pantone>CMYK conversion) into 3-screen ones by replacing the lowest CMY value with an appropriate amount of black.

There's a great explanation of it in the CMYK Process Tint Guide that DesignFrame and Hennegan produced (but unfortunately they didn't put the info online).

Personally, I prefer your first since it has a more muted feel, which to me is appropriate to the old wanted poster style.

[MikeM33]

Black is a color that technically does not exist in nature. It is extremely difficult, however, to create those shades using blue, red and yellow (or CMY). When I studied painting I was told by many great instructors to avoid black. The results are usually interresting since black tends to make an image look "manufactured" or "fake". Black is the combination of all color whereas white is the absence of color.

In your examples there are two contrasting images. I cannot tell which one was the intended result. I can only say that my preference would be for the brighter image. I can only guess this was the image you were talking about.

MikeM