Complementary colors the complementary wavelength to produce a neutral color (gray or white). Color printing, like painting, also uses subtractive colors, but the complementary colors are different from those used in painting. As a result, the same logic applies as to colors produced by light. Color printing uses the CMYK color model, making colors by overprinting cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. In printing the most common complementary colors are magenta–green, yellow–blue, and cyan–red. In terms of complementary/opposite colors, this model gives exactly the same result as using the RGB model. Black is added when needed to make the colors darker. The
Magenta colors of pigment. (The secondary colors of pigment are blue, green, and red.) As such, the hue magenta is the complement of green: magenta pigments absorb green light; thus magenta and green are opposite colors. The CMYK printing process was invented in the 1890s, when newspapers began to publish color comic strips. Process magenta is not an RGB color, and there is no fixed conversion from CMYK primaries to RGB. Different formulations are used for printer's ink, so there may be variations in the printed color that is pure magenta ink. A typical formulation of "process magenta" is shown in