Skip to main content
iDESci
Participant
February 23, 2018
Question

Pantone colour not in Illustrator CC

  • February 23, 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 10632 views

I am trying to find a Pantone Swatch. It is not in the Illustrator library. I see on the Pantone website one can buy the full updated library, but I only need two specific colors. Any advice please or how I can get these two swatches on my system without buying the full book.

Herewith the two colors.

Pantone 2196 Uncoated

Pantone 3517 Uncoated

Thank you

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

rob day
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 28, 2018

BTW, Pantone does not restrict sharing their libraries:

Sharing Libraries from PANTONE Color Manager with Workgroup - Pantone.com

rob day
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 28, 2018

There's a link to the latest Pantone+ libraries here:

Re: Pantone+ vs. Pantone Colors?

Inspiring
February 26, 2018

You may be able to purchase Pantone's Color Manager app which should come loaded with the latest libraries.  You'd get the Color Manager free with a purchase of their book(s), but you said you did not want to do that.  There is another option which is you could create a Spot Color swatch and name it 2196U, but you'd have to tell the prepress people you have your color named, but not actually built.  You'd have to be careful proceeding in that direction.

NB, colourmanagement
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 23, 2018

Hi

Are you (or your client) going to pay for the 'special' colours on the press, or, as many do, have them simulated from the standard CMYK inks? If the latter then I'd find out what the CMYK ink values would be and enter those in Illustrator to make custom swatches.

I've not done this myself, but I am sure that if you can get L*a*b* values (those values would be captured by reading off a pantone swatch with a spectrophotometer) then you could make a couple of custom swatches in Illustrator.

If you can possibly measure those specific Pantone inks on the actual substrate for your job, you'll be one more step towards accuracy.

As I am sure you are aware uncoated paper differs significantly in how it takes the ink, so that one Pantone (or CMYK) ink mix may appear siginificantly differently on each paper.

I hope this helps

if so, please mark it as helpful - if it solves your problem mark as "correct answer"

that helps others later who may search this forum for the same solution.

Thanks

neil barstow, colourmanagement