Color printing yellow (minus-blue) overprinted by magenta (minus green) yields red. Where all three inks may overlap, almost all incident light is absorbed or subtracted, yielding near black, but in practical terms it is better and cheaper to use a separate black ink instead of combining three colored inks. The secondary or subtractive colors cyan, magenta and yellow may be considered "primary" by printers and watercolorists (whose basic inks and paints are transparent). Two graphic techniques are required to prepare images for four-color printing. In the "pre-press" stage, original images are translated into forms that can be used on a printing press,
Shades of magenta a single wavelength. Humans, being trichromats, can only see as far as 380 nanometers into the spectrum, i.e., as far as violet. The hue magenta is the complement of green: magenta pigments absorb green light, thus magenta and green are opposite colors. Before "printer's magenta" was invented in the 1890s for CMYK printing, and "electric magenta" was invented in the 1980s for computer displays, these two artificially engineered colors were preceded by the color displayed at right, which is the color originally called "magenta" made from coal tar dyes in the year 1859. Besides being called original magenta, magenta dye