The first step, as mentioned earlier, involves the design and fabrication of aluminum plates that actually carry the image of lettering and details that will be transferred to the paper. The plates themselves are monochrome, only handling one color at a time. However, multiple plates are used and, when combined in a printing process, they create a complete color picture on the paper. This approach involves variations of intensity of four main colors, ranging from black to cyan and magenta and yellow as well. They are better known in the industry as CYMK. Very modern offset printing can do more now with additional colors, but for many decades the four-color set was the standard.