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Question

CMYK Pantone Guide differs from InDesign values

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 14, 2022
5 replies
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Just purchased the Pantone CMYK printed color guides. After entering a few of the colors in InDesign, I noticed that all the values are different than the printed formulas in the Pantone book. Same number system for the names of the colors but the CMYK values are very different. Any ideas how to get InDesign to conform to Pantones formulas for the CMYK colors?

How to

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Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Can you give some examples of colours that have diffrences between waht you are seeing in the app swatches as opposed to the printed swatches.

The ones I suspect may have slight changes are the ones that have direct spot matches.. these are the ones in your swatchbook that have an asterisk beside them.

K

KaneDesignAuthor

Participant

Sorry to be late in replying, Adobe just now let me know there were responses to my question. So, let me be clearer, if I can. I am using the printed, Pantone 4 CMYK color book. There is only this PRINTED book from Adobe to be foud on their website. To see how a color will look when printed, seeing it printed is essential. So for 4-color printing, using Adobe's only printed color sample book. It is their latest book. Using InDesign's colors, for the same color sample, like P 121-7 C, does not match Pantone's CMYK percentages. Whatever the Pantone Plus colors are, I don't see an actual printed sample book available. Did I miss it?

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Pantone is the only one that can print these swatchbooks, so I'm assuming you mean Pantone and not Adobe.

Pantone tweaks their libraries all the time, especially when technology gets better and colour matching is even better than before.

The Pantone Libraries that have been included in Adobe products (and other apps like Quark's and Corel's) have not been updated for many years as Pantone has decided to no longer license them in that way any longer, so there is a good chance the values you see now for P 121-7 C in your newly-purchased Swatchbook might be different than the swatch in your Adobe apps. Pantone's values are the latest and correct ones going forward and superecede anything that has been included in the apps before.

(btw: Ignore the Pantone Plus business.. that refers to Spot Ink libraries which you are not talking about here)

Pantone wants to make money off this now, like everybody these days, so the only way to update your libraries is to purchase Pantone Cannect which will do the updating for you... at a price, of course.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

>>>Ignore the Pantone Plus business...

Pantone Plus also refers to the CMYK guides. I have the older CMYK guides that had 1x8 swatches per page. The Pantone Plus has 2x8 swatches per page, using less paper.

Either guide set is good since CMYK doesn't go out of style, but as Brad mentioned, the newer guides might have tighter color specs.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

If you have different color profiles you need different values to get close to any spot color. Table values are only static. So you will get much closer, when you use InDesign’s color management with the correct output profile.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

I'm assuming since the OP mentioned CMYK guides and not Solid, they are not using spot colors.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

What David said.

Also: what do you mean by "entering a few of the colors into InDesign"?

If these are true Pantone CMYK swatches, they would have names like P 121-7 C

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Pantone changes the numbers periodically to get better results on modern presses.

Did you get the Pantone Plus guides?

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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