> Steve, Richard, Shangara and Karl...extremely helpful...yes it would appear > my (borrowed) Pantone swatches are out of date. Many thanks all round.
One has to be *sure* of which COLOUR BOOK the actual Pantone colour is being chosen from. There are solid SPOT colour books, there are tint process simulations of spot colours etc. Photoshop 7, Illus10 and ID2? all use the new Pantone 2000 formula, which is different from earlier versions in older apps or in older solid to process swatch book CMYK recipes etc. Another thing to watch out for in Photoshop 7 is that it now ties the RGB or CMYK working space into the Pantone swatch (which is now LAB based) - so that the CMYK values in the colour build are now based on your colour settings and are not a hard wired value as in the 'bad old days'. There are different colour books to choose from, some LAB based and some like the old books with hard wired values. So even though there is a long history of print users saying that PMS XXX is really a build of Xc Xm Xy Xk - this was and has never been the case, as the numbers only make sense under the unknown Pantone press conditions...it is just that for many years this less than ideal standard was taken as gospel by many users. On the flipside, just as many users always built their own values for their own colours, making their own standards which printed better (as the numbers suited their conditions better than Pantones). So, as per usual when working with spot colours for publishing between one or more apps... * Ask yourslef - Do you need a four colour simulation of a spot ink, or do you really need a spot separation. And if a spot sep is required, it is really a godd idea to read up and or ask questions first before jumping into things...spot output is not for the unwary. * Do ensure that every application has the same exact spelling for the same colour swatch (including upper/lower case etc). * Do ensure that every application is using the same numerical value build for the same colour. * Do ensure that the same spot colour does not appear more than once in the same layout file (PMS 032 CV and PMS 032 CVC) - as there is a good chance that more than one object will end up being in the wrong separation. * Do print separated lasers to a PostScript printer before wasting time and money on film or plates. Stephen Marsh. =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
