Pantone colors vs. CMYK-print

[Wolfgang]

Nowadays, everybody is using online printers, so spot colors are pretty much off the table.
There are two main competitors, both require ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) as profile.
I have set up complete profiles for them in Acrobat and like I said, usually the prints look just like they should.

I have a printed business card of the client.
The green on it is 99% identical to the 382U of the Pantone swatch book.
Difference might be because of the paper used or the age of my swatchbook.

Both of them look like my third, most greenish/least yellowish, sample above though.

I guess we will just have to print this batch and hope for the best.

[mwenz]

I have used online printers that use Pantone colors.

Be that as it may, if you know the Pantone number and the output profile, use them and set the Xara application to embed the profile. And export to cmyk so the Pantone is a forced conversion.

The conversion will be accurate, but if they used a different profile to create their print pdf, there may be a difference. The only other thing you could do is use the exact cmyk breakdown if you knew it. Even then if the press is different that too would likely result in a shift.

[mwenz]

Using that profile, below are the cmyk numbers that make up Pantone 382 U according to Pantone's PCM software.



And I take back what I wrote above. XDP cannot force the conversion. In the screen shot below, the upper rectangle is the cmyk values and the lower one is that spot as a spot color.

[Wolfgang]

And I take back what I wrote above. XDP cannot force the conversion. In the screen shot below, the upper rectangle is the cmyk values and the lower one is that spot as a spot color.

By "upper rectangle", do you mean the back one, because it is higher up on the y-axis, or the one above the other on the z-axis?

The one in the back matches the business card very closely.
Thank you.

[Wolfgang]

Sorry I made a mistake, slightly new situation:

When I wrote

Obviously I used Xara's "Pantone 382U" from the color gallery

I seem to have remembered that wrongly.
When I opened the logo (.eps) in Xara, two *named* colors were imported. NOT spot colors.
Those colors were named "Pantone 382U" and "Pantone 419U" and they came from the official logo. So I must have taken for granted that those were the right colors.

After Mike's last post, I checked his color samples against mine.
In Xara, in Acrobat and in Photoshop. And none of the two were anywhere near anyone of mine.

So I went back to start and picked the actual *spot* colors, this time really from Xara's gallery.

Exported the whole thing again, and look at that, new problem. Possibly.

The color seems right by hue now.
But what was too much saturation in the first export is too little now.

Now I am really unsure what to do.
Heads ups anybody?

[mwenz]

The one higher on the page is the upper one, which is at the back of the stack. It is the one using the cmyk values that I posted.

Please consider uploading the logo and sending me a download link via private message.