Pantone colors are printing blank when printing from Illustrator using Photoshop DSC.EPS

Question

While trying to print artwork with spot colors from Adobe Illustrator the color in the 2nd channel will always print blank regardless of what print device or setting that is used. I have included the DSC EPS files as well as the AI files and the subsequent print of the file as a pdf. Whichever pantone color is placed in location 2 of the channels in Photoshop will print blank. This is a bug that has popped up since Pantone pulled it's colors from Adobe and the Pantone colors automatically are changed to black.

Below is how the Ai file looks:

Below is how Pantone 7500 prints out. Notice how it prints blank with it placed in channel 2 of photoshop. Same file, same spots colors, just a different location in Photoshop.

Below is how Pantone Warm Red prints out. Notice how it prints blank with it placed in channel 2 of photoshop. Same file, same spots colors, just a different location in Photoshop.

Below is how the channels look in Photoshop (warm red C prints blank in this case):

For some reason channel 2 is printing blank. It does not matter which color is placed there anything in channel 2 will not print.

Now here's the crazy part. I've had this happen to 8 different files I've opened recently, but the location that does not print changes for each of them. Sometimes it's channel 2, sometimes it's channel 6. The only fix has been to rebuild the file by making a new file and manually copying the channels over one by one, and (very important) you have to not use official Pantone color names or pantone pickers in Photoshop. It has to be named something not PANTONE and has to be a hex color.

I believe this bug has something to do with the conversion process of pantone colors being changed to black if you don't have the pantone colors installed as it's happening with existing files that used pantone colors via the color picker. If it was created with hex values the issue doesn't seem to happen. The big bummer part is just changing the pantone colors and names after Adobe makes the conversion does not work. You have to rebuild it from a new file or the bug will still keep happening. This means all old files using Pantones will have to be rebuilt in order to print them properly. There must be something saved in the channel info that is still saying it is/was a Pantone color even after changing it to a different color or name.

I've had 8 printers call me in the last two days that have been having this issue with screens printing blank for spot colors. This is going to become a massive issue if it's not fixed before they do the full update that will no longer have any of the pantone colors available.

EDIT: It won't let me attached the Ai file for some reason. But you can infer from the pdf and EPS files that are included. View the EPS files in Photoshop not Illustrator.

Digital Halftones · Accepted Answer

Ok I've fully figured out the bug and what is causing it. Adobe illustrator has default names for Pantone swatches. If you use the default name for the channel name in photoshop the swatch will automatically update it to the Pantone swatch on file in Illustrator's color book regardless of the color you picked in Photoshop manually. The issue arises when the default name is not on file (and they all won't be once Pantone color support is dropped without a subscription). In my case it was "PANTONE 2156 C". If you check the default Pantone color books in Illustrator currently this color is not included, so what happens is Illustrator reads the swatch name sees it's called a Pantone color but can't locate the book color info for it. Instead of stating the color book is missing it displays as the original swatch color and reads it as a CMYK value, but Illustrator still thinks its a Pantone color. The result when you print is whatever spot color is placed below that unidentified spot color, ie "PANTONE 2156 C" does not print. It just prints blank. If I move the ""PANTONE 2156 C" to location 2 the 3rd spot prints blank, if I move it to location 4 the 5th spot prints blank. This explains why I was seeing this happen across multiple files but in different channel locations each time. The fix is to change the unidentified Pantone color swatch color mode option to RGB, LAB or HSB mode. CMYK mode can be used for spot colors normally but not when ANY of the swatches have an official PANTONE color name in the file. For some reason naming a swatch PANTONE that is not in the existing color book on that system is defaulting it to CMYK mode and causing the following color in the file to print blank.

A quick fix by Adobe could be to default PANTONE missing colors to RGB/LAB mode for all swatches when they are missing. I really hope they can fix this before Pantone drops full support and we lose all of the official color books otherwise all previous files that used pantone colors will have this issue when trying to reprint them.

I made a video showing what I mean.

https://youtu.be/Vr2Ok1qQ7zE

Ton Frederiks · Answer

Just tried it with your channels eps file and that works too.

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