Dye Calculator CMYK version

Ok peeps I'm going to make this quick so that this gets out today instead of three weeks from now. (I know me, and that's how it will go if I don't get this out now.) Let me know on Facebook or Instagram if you have any questions.

To start here is the link to the template. As always, to make it your own hit "file" and "make a copy". Give it your own name and voila, it's yours.

So basically this calculator works almost exactly the same as The Dye Calculator with one crucial difference and that is that it only works with CMYK primaries. If you don't know, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are the primaries that most printers use and I would love to get into how that works but that will have to wait till another day. In short, CMYK are way better primaries than red, yellow and blue and I encourage you to use them because, and here's the kicker, you can look up the CMYK values for any color you see on your computer. (WARNING!: Colors are displayed differently on your screen than they will look on the printed page, so print out a color before you choose to try to dye it. The CMYK values will match the printed version of the color not the computer screen version)

In order to get this out today I'm going to have to assume that you already know a little bit about color models so if you don't here's a great breakdown. And here's a great site that is intended for creating color palettes and has features that will allow you to look up the all the values you will need to for this calculator.

Ok once you have your CMYK values you might notice they are not percentages. They are a value that range from 0 to 100 so it might be tempting to just put them in the regular dye calculator and pretend they are percentages but don't do it! You will end up with a very different color than you are expecting. Instead, put them in the CMYK Dye Calculator and it will turn them into percentages by adding up all the primaries in a signal color and then dividing each value by that total. Now you have percentages that actually represent how much relative cyan, magenta, yellow, and black you need. But those percentages could represent any shade of that color from a very pale to very bright version. To get the right saturation you will look up one more value and that's saturation, surprise surprise. Pull this value from the HSB color model of the color you have selected. OR you can get the value by determining what depth of shade you want based on prior experience of how your dyes behave and then entering in the corresponding percentage into the saturation input field. 1% DOS = 100% So if you know that .75% is about the right depth of shade you'll put in 75%, if you want 3% DOS then use 300%.

Everything else about this calculator is the same as the basic one. So check out that post if you haven't before. And if you need more rows for more colors per colorway check out my previous blog post about expanding The Dye Calculator.

Hope this aids you on all your dyeing adventures!