Shades of magenta yellow and cyan, constitute the three subtractive primary colors of pigment. (The secondary colors of pigment are blue, green, and red.) As such, 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 can be variations in the printed color that is pure magenta ink. A typical formulation of "process magenta" is shown in the color box at right. The source of the color shown at
CMYK color model method that has emerged for the case of halftone printing is to treat each tiny overlap of color dots as one of 8 (combinations of CMY) or of 16 (combinations of CMYK) colors, which in this context are known as "Neugebauer primaries". The resultant color would be an area-weighted colorimetric combination of these primary colors, except that the "Yule–Nielsen" effect of scattered light between and within the areas complicates the physics and the analysis; empirical formulas for such analysis have been developed, in terms of detailed dye combination absorption spectra and empirical parameters. CMYK color model The CMYK color model