What is neutral?

If you are familiar with the eyedropper tool, then you probably see a lot of CMYK numbers like these shown in the info pallet. To tell the truth, I haven't made color decisions in CMYK for a long time. For most critical decisions, there are simply much better color spaces to choose from. Lets take neutrals for example.

The CMYK values 69,63,62,57 doesn't really tell me if it's neutral. Not very clearly anyway. In fact, if I thought about it, I'd probably wonder why Cyan is so much higher than the Magenta and Yellow but we'll save that discussion for another post. For now, let us use a color space that actually tells us what we want to know about neutrality.

Examining the info pallet, notice the icon to the left of the color numbers. It's actually a pull down menu. Click on it and select Lab.
































Now, you'll see that the CMYK values are displayed in Lab. The great thing about Lab is that the L channel carries all the light and dark information where the a and b channel contains the color. If BOTH a channel and b channel equal 0, then it is neutral. Guaranteed. If your monitor, proofer, press or whatever shows it is NOT neutral, then there is something wrong with the monitor, proofer or press. Period. It's nice to have that level of confidence especially when color can be so subjective.





Though we like to have a 0/0 in the L*a*b color channels, being off by one or two points is usually not a deal breaker. It is nearly impossible to maintain that level of precision when using the Richard Free Technique or the Uber-K Separation. If you click on the image above, you'll notice that this image is perfectly neutral within it's current color space. It was transformed into U.S Web Coated (SWOP)v2 using the Muckian Maneuver.

In this post, you've learned how to determine if a value is truly neutral, within it's assigned color space. Good luck and happy printing.

Special thanks goes out to the very talented photographer Leslie Alsheimer who gave us permission to feature one of her images for this article. Visit her site to see more examples of excellent black & white photography. Also visit Santa Fe Digital Darkroom where Leslie contributes her skills to help photographers get the most out of their images.