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A
Anonymous
June 20, 2012
Question

Pantone 295U is off from my pantone book

  • June 20, 2012
  • 3 replies
  • 26479 views

I am working with a client that uses pantone 295u as their primary color. I looked it up in my physical pantone book and it is a nice dark blue even in the uncoated guide. But...when I use the color book in ilustrator and pull up PMS 295 it looks like a 75% tint of the color, its not the dark blue thats in the printed guide book. I tried using overprint preview to see if the LAB preview might help, but with this color it makes no difference. Has anyone run into this? I'm not sure how to work with this as I cant show this greyed version in my proofs with the client as they will think I have not selected the right color.

Thanks

-KC

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    3 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    June 21, 2012

    Thanks for all the feedback. I spent a lot of the day yesterday trying to track down this issue and it was good to get some feedback from people. Below is a screen grab of what I am looking at. Clearly it will be slightly off from monitor to monitor, but as you can see this is a pretty radical shift in color. One thing I noticed is that the CMYK valused that the style guide is called out are different from the CYMK values that pantone called out in the Pantone plus color bridge. Thats what I am showing with the three blocks of color below. PMS color on the left, CMYK according to style guide in the center and CMYK according to my PMS bridge guide on the right.

    The window that is below is a the style guide.I think I might be on to something here, but Im not sure whats going on. The style guide was sent to me as a PDF, when I open it in illustrator and look at this page with the color specs, the color seems to be closer to the CMYK values they are calling out. But if I copy paste it into my comps its turns to the chalky version of the blue color. You can see from the screen grab that the color mode on the PDF is RGB so I created a new comp and made it RBG and set up the color profiles to match the PDF, but when I copy paste into that new document it still changes to the chalky version. There clearly must be some sort of color setting I'm missing that is causeing this to happen when I copy paste it into a new document, but I am not sure what to look for. Any Ideas?

    I just upgraded to 6.0 from 5.0 but I was having the issue in 5.0 as well. This might be becaue I went to the pantone website and updated all the color books directly from their website so I had all the pantone+ colors that where in our new Pantone+ physical swatch books. So I belive all the versions of illy I have on my machine should all be using the + books.

    These are the settings for the style guide for reference. When I created a new document with these same settings and copy pasted the color from the style guide the color changed even though all these settings where the same and they where both set to RGB. I'm missing something here, but not sure what.

    Thanks again for all your help!

    -KC

    A
    Anonymous
    June 21, 2012

    Ok, I think I might be getting somewhere.

    This is a screen grab from the style guide file, note the RGB icon under the 100%

    Now this is what happened when I copy pasted the above color into another document,

    Note the RGB icon is now magicly a CMYK icon...

    So, I feel like I know a little more about whats going on, but I have no idea about why and what this means. Is there any way for me to use the color from the style guide with the RBG icon so it previews closer to the color? And is that a mistake, am I setting myself up for having it print incorectly by doing that? I'm so used to only sending CMYK to printers that I get scared to send them anything else. They will be printing banners on a digital press so its not technicaly CMYK printing there are some other colors involved in the process so I'm not sure what to do at this point.

    Thanks,

    KC

    A
    Anonymous
    June 21, 2012

    Update: I think I figured this out at least the basics. First off, I mispoke in the last post. It was changing from RGB to LAB. I missread the icons. So, it apears to be a Illustrator 6.0 thing with illy changing it to Lab color. But, what I found out is that if I open a new document and chose the "Basic RGB" template to set up the new document, then it will use the RGB versions of the colors for the preview. I can then switch back to CMYK mode and it still pulls the RGB values so it previews correctly on screen. I have no idea what is going on under the hood here. I feel like there must be sume setting that is being set in the template that is not aparent. It would be nice to know so that I could just switch it on/off vrs having to create a new document. In the past I had always used the "Print" template when creating new documents so I'm not sure if I would be messing something up by starting with the RGB and then changeing to CMYK mode.  Thoughts?

    -KC

    E
    emil emil
    Inspiring
    June 21, 2012

    It looks the same on my monitor and the book. Is your monitor calibrated and profiled?

    @ Jacob,

    These are the book values provided by Pantone and they display the color way off (much more saturated on my monitor) than the color in the book. In the Swatches palette, if I select Spot Colors and choose the Lab conversion method this changes the color on screen and matches the actual book. The Lab values are also provided by Pantone and can be checked by double clicking the swatch and making sure the sliders are set to Book Color mode. Then these values are translated by the color management from the Lab color space to the color space in the document which is indicated in the Show menu at the bottom left of the document window when set to Color Profile.

    On my computer the conversion from Lab to U.S Web Coated (SWAP) v2 gives me 85.14/ 67.04/33.58/ 16.16 but these numbers will be different for each different color space used and the color appearance will also be corrected to the monitor's color space of the user. In this way the color will look the same on calibrated monitors when using the same viewing conditions

    The book method values provided by Pantone will be the same for everyone but the appearance on screen will not match any pantone ink final output because  they are not converted and corrected to any color space. You know that each paper substrate like coated and uncoated have different color spaces (profiles) which describe how the same ink produces different colors on different media. The book method values are absolute and does not take this into account.

    _scott__
    _scott__
    Legend
    June 21, 2012

    What version of Illustrator?

    Pantone color builds changed in CS6.

    E
    emil emil
    Inspiring
    June 21, 2012

    I'm using CS5 but AFAIK in CS6 the only change is that it is using the new Pantone Plus books which include more colors but the lab values of the colors previously available remain the same. However for the Plus books, Pantone is not providing the CMYK book values like before but only the lab values. For this reason CS6 is using lab as default method for conversion and the CMYK book values option is available only for the old books.

    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    Jacob BuggeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 20, 2012

    Kevin,

    Obviously, it should look right.

    Which CMYK values do you get if you create a copy of a path with that fill and then, with that selected, click CMYK in the Color palette/panel flyout (maybe not exactly depending on version, you should get something like 100/57/0/40)?

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