CMYK Colour Converter

In short CMYK is subtractive — cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink absorbing light from white paper — while your screen is additive, mixing red, green and blue light. Converting between them is arithmetic, but it is the one conversion on this site that genuinely loses information, because ink simply cannot reach some of the colours a screen can. Vivid cyans, bright oranges, pure greens and anything neon has no CMYK equivalent, so the conversion returns the nearest printable colour and the result looks flatter than what you approved on screen. This is why print proofs exist and why a brand guideline usually specifies both a HEX and a separate CMYK or Pantone value rather than converting one into the other. Two practical notes. There is no single correct CMYK conversion — the real answer depends on the paper, the ink and the press profile, so treat any figure here as a starting point and let the printer's ICC profile do the final conversion. And rich black for large solid areas is not K:100 alone; printers usually want cyan and magenta added underneath, or the black looks washed out next to a photograph.