RGB

Every phone, monitor, and camera builds its picture from RGB — red, green, and blue light combined at different intensities to create the millions of colors a screen can display. Because light adds together toward white, RGB can produce eye-popping neons, electric teals, and deep saturated purples that fall outside CMYK's four-ink printing range and further outside the roughly dozen stock plastisol colors most screen shops keep mixed and ready. A logo built and approved on-screen in RGB is not automatically the same file a press can run.

For a buyer, this shows up the moment art gets uploaded as a JPEG or PNG straight from a phone or a Canva export — vivid on the screen, but the neon green in the file has no exact plastisol match, only a close one. We've had a client's "brand blue" come back visibly duller on a Gildan 2000 because the RGB value she picked in a slideshow simply didn't exist as a mixable ink, and the closest Pantone match was as near as physics allowed.

Pros ask for vector art built in, or converted to, CMYK or specified by Pantone number before quoting a spot-color job, since that's the language screens and inks actually speak. If a buyer only has an RGB file, a good shop converts it and flags which colors will shift, rather than promising an exact on-screen match it can't deliver. Saving a rough proof as CMYK before final approval catches most of the surprise ahead of press time.

The common mistake is assuming a bright color on a laptop screen guarantees a bright print. Screens emit light; shirts reflect it off opaque ink, and no combination of plastisol reproduces RGB's full range. Buyers chasing a specific neon should ask up front whether it's achievable in ink at all, rather than finding out after a press check.