how do I match Pantone Swatch colours on my screen

[soft_pilot_watch]

Hi there,

I am having colour profile troubles. The swatches in my PANTONE book do not match what I am seeing on screen. I am running Illustrator CS6. My colour synchronisation in Bridge is set to North American General Purpose 2 across all my Adobe Creative Suite programs (Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator). Not sure if this is correct colour profile??  Just need to know how to fix colour settings so that my PANTONE swatches on screen reflect what is in the PANTON book. Can someone please help me????

[jdanek]

What you see on-screen has a lot to do with your monitor.  The profile you mention is more an output profile.  What I would recommend is calibrating your monitor ( if you have not already ).  What system are you running?  What type of monitor do you have?  How far off are the colors?  Can you give an example?  Maybe show a screen grab of a particular Pantone swatch via Illustrator?  Keep in mind that the printed Pantone book is reflective color and your screen is transmissive.  They may never match.

[soft_pilot_watch]

Hi, and thank you for your reply!  I am running OS X El Capitan ver. 10.11.3 and Adobe Creative Suite CS6.

My display profile has been calibrated but not sure if I should be selecting another option from the dialogue box....???

See screen shots attached for colour profiles in both system settings and Bridge suite colour settings.

Is it a case of having the wrong profiles selected for both??

[soft_pilot_watch]

[jdanek]

Can you show your Illustrator Color Settings?  Did you have the same problem before going to El Capitan?

[soft_pilot_watch]

Hi, and thank you for your reply!  I am running OS X El Capitan ver. 10.11.3 and Adobe Creative Suite CS6.

My display profile has been calibrated but not sure if I should be selecting another option from the dialogue box....???

See screen shots attached for colour profiles in both system settings and Bridge suite colour settings.

Is it a case of having the wrong profiles selected for both??

[G_Hoffmann]

soft_pilot,

if all of your your swatches are looking considerably wrong, then please

refer to jdanek`s advice.

If only some of them (the most vibrant swatches) are affected, then you

may read these explanations:

Nowadays Pantone Swatches have to be defined by Lab. Any discussion

about Swatches in RGB or CMYK would be quite misleading.

Let's start with this doc:

http://docs-hoffmann.de/swatch16032005.pdf

p.4 – p.14 show a set of more than 1100 swatches. All are defined by Lab.

Any page can be placed (opened) in Photoshop in mode Lab (or any other,

which would be quite wrong for following discussion).

Each swatch contains besides Lab values two triples of numbers, indicated

by (s) for sRGB and by (a) for aRGB=Adobe RGB(1998).

If any of these numbers is either clipped at 0 or at 255, then the color

will be out-of-gamut for either sRGB or aRGB. Please let us ignore the

rare case of colors exactly at the gamut boundary.

If the monitor profile is near to sRGB, then aRGB colors will be further

clipped, if in-gamut for aRGB but out-of-gamut for sRGB.

A wide-gamut monitor is mostly near to aRGB. Then only those swatch

colors will be clipped which show in the column (a) numbers  0  or 255.

So far it is assumed, that the placing or opening in Photoshop happens

as Lab page.

We can see immediately from these first 11 pages, that many swatches

are out-of-gamut for sRGB or aRGB, thus showing a wrong appearance

on monitors.

The following pages in the doc demonstrate this by other presentations,

which can be explained on request.

Which role play the global color settings, like North American General

Purpose 2 ? This combination contains sRGB as RGB-working space.

As long as  the source and the Photoshop document are still in Lab,

these global settings are meaningless.

Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann