One of several color encoding systems used by printers for combining primary colors to produce a full-color image. In CMYK, colors are expressed by the subtractive primaries (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Black is represented by K since black keyline text appears on this layer. Two other common acronyms for 6 colors are CMYKcm (light cyan, cyan, light magenta, magenta, yellow, and black) and CMYKOG (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, orange, and green).

See Hexachrome.