In my last post I explored Hand Coloring an image. I used the RGB Color Mode. The tutorial I was kind of following said to use CMYK. At the time I thought RGB worked fine. In fact I mentioned in the previous post that he said to use CMYK and I used RGB.

The reason I used RGB? Because it is my default mode and by the time I remembered to change it to CMYK I’d done most of my mods and added a bunch of layers that would be deleted if I moved from RGB to CMYK. (big breath) It’s called stupid laziness. Not really a suggested design strategy. Although I expect most of us practice it more often then we’d like to admit.

I liked the affect so I decided to try it again on another engagement image. As before, I did all my mods and adjustments then started my hand color process before I thought to change to CMYK. Of course I didn’t want to lose my previous work, so I just kept going. Later, it started to bug me. So I decided to do it again, this time using CMYK.

This is the side by side comparison of the two treatments. The first is RGB. The second is CMYK:

I expected the difference in having the black channel would give me control over the luminance within the color. And I was right. That additional channel allowed me to dial in the luminance of the color.  While the RGB mode worked, the CMYK provides more control and more depth.

I still like the first one I did, but for this one, I preferred the CMYK version better. It had more depth, the colors were more natural and overall it was easier to get what I wanted.