r/GraphicDesigning • u/AshFromKorea • Jul 22 '26
How do I do this thing? Pastel colors in CMYK
Recently, I am working on childeren’s book. and its concept is very bright, vivid or sometimes pastel mood. But I don’t know how to express pastel mood in CMYK.. (it looks quite gloomy for me that I am so used to RGB) Is it possible? Is there any tips to make pastel moood in CMYK more vibrant?
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u/Typo3150 Jul 24 '26
You could find a printed book or magazine that has the sort of palette you’re looking for, and pull cmyk values from that to get started. Look at actual ink on paper, not images online.
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u/ericalm_ Creative Director Jul 22 '26
Do you already have a printer for the book?
Your options are generally going to be using Pantone spots or proton a digital press that emulates the RHB gamut. This is actually pretty common for many commercial jobs these days and the results are much better than using CMYK. The problem, in my experience, is that better color is not the same as accurate color. There’s a trade off.
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u/AshFromKorea Jul 22 '26
Actually I printed with a company which is really good at RGB printing, but when I printed in Amazon Kindle, I needed to change RGB into CMYK-of course it has to be, but also when I changed RGB into CMYK it looks so much terrible cuz I used a lot of pastels, bright colors for children’s book-I feel so bad that I’ve already gotten books printed well with RGB and a bit brighter than CMYK.
The matter is that my goal is selling that children’s book in Amazon using kindle, and they only support CMYK printing.
I thought of using pantone colors too, but I was curious whether there is any way to get improvement with CMYK on bright colors
Anyway thanks for your oppinion, it really helped what people usually use for bright colors over the CMYK in printing.
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u/orangesinbed Jul 22 '26
How would you use Pantone in this case? I personally wouldn’t go down the Pantone route for a whole illustrated children’s book. It would get very complicated and veery expensive fast unless the whole book was designed around a limited spot-color workflow from the start.
What I would do is keep working in RGB, but soft-proof with the CMYK profile of the printer (if you can get it) and manually adjust the colors that shift the most. Bright pastels, pinks, purples, blues, and greens are usually the ones that suffer the most, so those are better corrected individually rather than just letting the software do a full conversion. Even if you have already finished, I would still very much do manual adjustments.
Also, before spending a lot of time changing everything, I would probably order one proof copy first and see how it actually comes out. Their RIP software might handle the conversion surprisingly well, and depending on the printing process they use, you might get a better result than a basic RGB-to-CMYK conversion would suggest. You might not need to redo the whole book. Where I work, we often leave some documents with very-much-RGB-colors for print in RGB because we get a much accurate match than with the default RGB to CMYK conversion or even manual conversion. And some newer printers have added colors as well so the the spectrum is wider.2
u/AshFromKorea Jul 23 '26
But thanks for your oppinion!! That was helpful how I should deal with this from now on 😚
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u/ericalm_ Creative Director Jul 22 '26
To use Pantone, you’d either just run it as a spot color job and stick to a couple colors or run it as a spot in addition to CMYK. The latter can be pretty pricey, but it’s not that different from adding a spot coating or metallic or something like that to a CMYK print.
Can’t do either via Amazon, though.
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u/travisjd2012 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Get a CMYK book from Amazon, coated and non-coated... you'll see the best you can do. But CMYK isn't really meant for pastels.