---
name: Subtractive colour
slug: subtractive-color
category: color
status: published
created: 2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Colour made by taking light away, where inks stack towards black and
  every added layer can only darken, which is why a screen blue cannot be
  printed.
aliases:
  - name: pigment mixing
    source: community
  - name: ink mixing
    source: community
tags:
  - editorial
  - perception
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - additive-color
    - cmyk
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - halftone
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Wikipedia: subtractive color"
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtractive_color
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: colour mixed by removing light, as ink does
---

Ink does not emit anything. A layer of cyan on white paper absorbs most of the red arriving from
the room and reflects the rest, so what reaches the eye is whatever the paper had minus what the
ink took. Add magenta over it and the green goes too, and the result is a dark blue rather than a
brighter anything: every layer can only subtract, so the stack runs towards black by construction.
Cyan and yellow give green, magenta and yellow give red, cyan and magenta give blue, and the three
together land on a muddy near-black. Not an actual black, which is the first practical fact about
the model: real inks are not ideal absorbers, three of them at full strength make a heavy brown
sludge that takes forever to dry, and that is exactly why print carries a fourth black ink and why
a rich black is mixed rather than printed from the black plate alone.

The consequence designers meet is gamut loss, and it hurts in one direction in particular. The
saturated colours a screen is best at are the ones ink is worst at: an emitted blue or a
fluorescent green sits well outside anything three absorbing layers can reach, so it comes back
from the press dull, dark, and slightly the wrong hue. The reverse problem barely exists, because
almost every colour ink can make is inside a screen's reach. So the honest workflow is to design
towards the smaller space when the piece will be printed, proof it, and treat the screen preview
as optimistic rather than as the truth. [CMYK](/cmyk) is where the specifics live: four named
inks, a total coverage limit, and a gamut with its own shape.

A subtractive stack is also why several print techniques on this site are tricks about layers
rather than choices about colour. [Halftone](/halftone) breaks a tone into dots so that a single
ink at full strength can stand in for every value between paper and ink, since the ink itself has
no lighter setting. [Duotone](/duotone) gets a whole image out of two inks by handing one the
shadows and one the midtones, which only works because the two subtract in a predictable order.
Both are answers to the same constraint: there is one paper, the inks only darken, and the
lightest thing available is to not print.

Screens work the other way round, by [additive colour](/additive-color), where three lights sum
towards white and stacking translucent layers makes them brighter. Holding both models in mind is
most of what it takes to predict which colours will survive the trip from one to the other.