CMYK to RGB Image Converter
Opens a real CMYK JPG or TIFF, reads the ink values inside it, and renders them as RGB the way that paper and those inks actually look, not the textbook formula.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Opens a real CMYK JPG or TIFF, reads the ink values inside it, and renders them as RGB the way that paper and those inks actually look, not the textbook formula.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
This file is already RGB - there is no CMYK in it to convert. Save it in whichever web format you need below.
Drop in a CMYK JPG or a CMYK TIFF and this converter opens the file itself, reads the four ink channels stored inside it - cyan, magenta, yellow and black - and renders them as RGB. Download the result as an sRGB PNG, JPG or WebP, ready for a website, an email, a social post or anything else that shows pictures on a screen. Everything runs in your browser, so the file is never uploaded anywhere. If the image you dropped turns out to be RGB already, the tool says so plainly instead of pretending to convert it, and still lets you save it in whichever web format you need.
An RGB image stores three numbers per pixel: how much red, green and blue light the screen should emit. A CMYK image stores four: how much of each printing ink lands on that spot of paper. They are not two labels on the same data, they are different data, and a CMYK file usually carries an ICC profile naming the press and paper it was separated for. That is also why a CMYK TIFF will not open in any browser at all, and why a CMYK JPEG shows up wrong, inverted or blank depending on which browser you try. This page does not hand your file to the browser - it parses the JPEG or TIFF, pulls out the actual ink numbers, and works from those.
Almost every CMYK to RGB converter online runs one line of arithmetic: red = 255 x (1 - cyan) x (1 - black), and the same for green and blue. That formula is the exact algebraic inverse of the naive separation that made the file, so it hands back numbers, not colors: it assumes ink is perfectly pure, paper is perfectly white, and a 50% halftone prints as exactly 50% coverage. None of those is true on a press.
This converter instead runs the press forward. Each ink covers its share of the paper - with dot gain, because a 50% dot prints fatter than 50% - and the reflectance moves from the paper's own white towards the color of a real solid ink patch, per channel. The four inks then multiply, the way ink layers actually do. Process inks are impure, so solid cyan comes back near 27, 163, 216 rather than the formula's electric 0, 255, 255, and that is what your cyan really looks like. Pick the profile your file was separated for and the colors land where the print does; the plain formula is still there as its own option, for when you want to match a calculator.
There is no ICC color engine in this page, and it does not claim one. If the file carries an embedded profile, the name is read and used to preselect the matching press preset, and it is shown in the file details next to the image - but its measured A2B tables are not interpolated. For a photo headed to a screen the difference is small; for a contract proof it is not, and that job belongs in Photoshop with the real profile loaded.
Uncoated stock and newsprint are not white. Choose Neutral and the paper's own tint is scaled away so white in the file becomes white on the screen - the same media-relative behaviour Photoshop's default conversion has. Choose As printed and the paper stays in the picture, which is what the sheet will really look like. On coated profiles the two are nearly identical; on newsprint the difference is the whole character of the image. The file details card also shows the total ink coverage the file uses, which is worth a glance: over 300% on coated stock or 240% on newsprint means the file was built past what the press allows, and the ink calculator goes into that further.
If you would rather do it on the desktop: in Photoshop it is Image > Mode > RGB Color, and Edit > Convert to Profile if you want to choose the rendering intent yourself. In Illustrator it is File > Document Color Mode > RGB Color, which changes the document, not just the view. In Affinity Photo it is Document > Color Format > RGB/8, and Procreate imports as RGB anyway. In every one of them the conversion quality comes from the CMYK profile the document is tagged with, so check Edit > Color Settings first if the result looks flat. Dropping the file above does the same job without the software, and shows you the ink numbers it worked from.
Converting a photo the other direction, for a print job rather than a screen, is the RGB to CMYK converter - it writes a real four-channel CMYK TIFF with the profile embedded, using the same press model as this page in reverse. For plain format changes with no color work at all, the converter handles PNG, JPG, WebP and TIFF; to look inside a TIFF first there is the TIFF viewer, and images buried in a print-ready PDF come out with the PDF image extractor.
Drop the file on this page, or click Select image. If it is a CMYK JPG or TIFF the tool reads its ink values, picks the press profile from the embedded ICC profile when there is one, and shows the RGB result immediately. Then choose PNG, JPG or WebP and download. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is installed.
Open the file details card with the i button beside the image. It names the color mode - CMYK with four ink channels, RGB with three, or grayscale with one - along with the file type, its compression, the embedded ICC profile and the resolution. A lot of files people are told to convert turn out to be RGB already, and this is where you find that out.
Because ink and light are different. A CMYK file can only hold colors that four inks on paper can make, and that set is smaller than a screen's, especially in bright greens, oranges and blues. Converting to RGB cannot invent color that was never in the file, so a CMYK image on a screen looks flatter than a photo that was born in RGB. What the conversion can get right is where those colors sit, and that is what choosing the correct press profile does.
The textbook one, the one every cmyk2rgb calculator uses, is R = 255 x (1 - C) x (1 - K), G = 255 x (1 - M) x (1 - K), B = 255 x (1 - Y) x (1 - K), with C, M, Y and K as fractions from 0 to 1. So C=0.6, M=0.2, Y=0, K=0.2 gives R=82, G=163, B=204. Choose the "Plain formula" profile in the dropdown and this page computes exactly that, to the byte. It is a fine way to get a rough RGB equivalent or a hex value for one CMYK color; it is not what ink looks like, which is why the press profiles exist.
CMYK TIFF yes - uncompressed, LZW, ZIP and PackBits, 8-bit or 16-bit, in either byte order, which covers what Photoshop and InDesign write. No browser can display a TIFF at all, so this page decodes it itself. PDF is a page layout rather than an image, so pull the pictures out of it first with the PDF image extractor and convert those.
No. The download is rendered from the full-resolution ink data, at the pixel dimensions the file came in at, and the resolution tag is shown in the file details. Saving as PNG is lossless; JPG and WebP re-compress, so pick PNG if the file is going back into a design program.
No. The JPEG and TIFF decoding, the color conversion and the encoding all happen in your browser, on your device. Nothing is transmitted, and the page keeps working with the network switched off once it has loaded.