Process colour
Colour printed by combining dots of the four standard inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
Also: four-colour process, full colour
Process colour is the everyday method of colour printing. Every colour in the picture is built from overlapping dots of the four standard inks. It can reproduce photographs and thousands of colours with only four plates, which makes it economical. Its limits are that some colours, especially vivid oranges, greens and deep blues, come out duller than intended, and that results vary a little between presses and papers. Where an exact colour matters, a spot ink is added as a fifth plate.