Re: Looking for Pantone 296C
Spot color is not web color and neither is it RGB or CMYK. You judge Spot Color based upon the printed swatches available at most printers not how your CMYK equivalents print.
Now having said that, much depends upon the calibration of your monitor and if you are seeing color correctly or not on your monitor. You can do a screen shot of the page and paste it into a program which does a good job of displaying CMYK colors such as CorelDRAW, Photoshop or Illustrator. You can change the image into CMYK, and voila, the color changes to nearly what is shown you on the screen in these programs. As the CMYK equivalents that programs such as Illustrator and CorelDRAW are quite accurate, you can also use the swatch book to create the right color formula for getting a good result when you are using CMYK printing.
Note also that Spot Color on coated stock appears brighter as it sits on top of the paper and reflects more light whereas much of the color seeps into the page on uncoated stock and the color looks dull by comparison.
Where Xara got their equivalent for the screen probably comes from test of their spot colors in .pdfs as it is important that the colors separate correctly for the press. And Adobe .pdf is the standard that all print shops use. If you note the attached .pdf, it shows the nearly black color as the actual representation of the spot color. If you are fortunate enough to have Adobe Professional, you can see that the spot color channel is being read correctly in the .pdf. This .pdf was made out of CorelDRAW which does an excellent job at spot color separations.
As far as what the actual swatch looks like, to be sure, I'd have to check my swatch book at work, but it is a very dark blue, much more so than the way it looks on the web. I do not think that is what Pantone expects you to compare to, this chart is designed for you to print out which will give you your approximation from your desktop printer as to what your spot colors will look like when printed.
In the attachment, the RGB swatch has been changed via the conversion to .pdf process so that the swatch which was RGB in CorelDRAW is now the relative shade of the conversion CorelDRAW did when I was running the program.
The first .pdf is CMYK and the second one even though it is doing the spot color correctly is set to reproduce the RGB. There is a lot of difference when the CMYK equivalent is now converted by the RGB. This is why color management is important because the processing of color which you see has to be done in the right order for you to see the correct colors when printed and an excellent reason why you should buy a swatch book to be sure.
Proofs shown to customers are best displayed in print when printed proofs are required. If they question the color, refer them to the swatch book.
Now on to what can and can't be done currently in Xara with spot color: overprinting cannot be simulated and printed correctly which means that on the screen you'd see a mix of two colors of ink, if you apply transparency to spot color, it separates to CMYK. Getting your percentages is rather hard to figure out on spot color but can be arrived at with tints in Xara. The output preview in the .pdf is not correct until you look at your separation preview when using Adobe Acrobat Professional Output Preview. But even so, the CMYK equivalent for printing reverts to the original screen view so it does not print correctly. The spot color prints correctly when set to 100% but the screen view does not see this. If you don't have Acrobat Professional, I am not sure what you are going to see but if you send such a .pdf to your local printer, they are not going to be happy with you. The display is not going to be correct. And unfortunately I was not able to get Acrobat Distiller to create a correct .pdf either. You get one .pdf that gives you the correct color separation and the other one which gives you the correct on-screen view. As it is the only program I have used that does this, it is not standard which makes the processing of the file hard for most printers, they are not sure what they will get when plating your job. Another thing you won't be able to do is to use the Shadow tool and get a spot color shadow, this must be done with blends. There is no search in the palette to look up spot color numbers so it is hard to find the color as Pantone added more hues and didn't have consecutive numbers and so you get a lot of other numbers in between some colors. Drop Shadows will separate to CMYK but you can simulate them with blends. And you have to use a zeroed out spot color for your white and if you use RGB white, then your shadow will separate to CMYK.
What is odd is that InDesign will import the Xara made .pdf and CorelDRAW won't but InDesign displays it incorrectly the same as Adobe Acrobat Professional does, however if you make a .pdf out of InDesign it is made correctly, it displays correctly on the screen and is also importable now into CorelDRAW. This is a lot of running around the bush for the people who must work with the .pdf output from Xara and I hope it is on the agenda of things which really need to get fixed. If you are using spot color for your customer in order to be thrifty, it is going to take more of the designer's time and the customer will of course not expect to pay more. And any problems on the job will be the designers fault as neither the customer not the print shop will want to assume responsibility. This is why is you do this a lot, a program which handles spot color correctly will save you time and money. The programs that do it right are QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and CorelDRAW. But and this is a big but, many people using all of these programs make loads of mistakes when it comes to spot color. The one which gives the best prepress print preview is CorelDRAW and with Illustrator you can print a .pdf but you need Acrobat Professional to really see your print preview properly to see what your color separation will do. InDesign and Quark, again, you are using Acrobat to see your color separations so the only one which is within a budget is CorelDRAW. If you are using MAC, there is CorelDRAW 11 which is out of publication and hard to come by and sells for more than the new CorelDRAW X3 and doesn't do as much as X3 for Windows. You can get the new DRAW on Ebay for less than $100. And it comes with the ability to make a good .pdf. You really should have Acrobat Professional. It is the tool from Adobe you really cannot afford to be without. It is how the professionals will check your work, if you can't check your own work, you can waste alot of time figuring it out and very often you won't find anyone with the time to help you.
Xara brought back spot color at what it could do when they dropped it, in the meanwhile everyone else moved along and made a lot of progress on what can be done with spot color. Xara has one heck of a good program, with Xara being designed on a budget, my guess is that to fix it would have been cost prohibitive for them. And they really don't think many people will use the spot color feature. Again, unless those in the know really have the experience of how to use spot color themselves, designing it so it works properly is an enigma to them.
When it comes to working fast, if you could use spot color quickly with Xara, but this is where CorelDRAW really has its strengths. It is very fast in this. Faster than Illustrator by far.
I do wish you luck and I hope you download a few programs that I mentioned and give them a try to see what makes sense for you and what is easiest to use. Mostly it will make the most sense for you to find out what the print shop you are using recommends. If they are a shop that uses Illustrator, it is going to cost you a lot of money to be able to get spot color to work for you. Illustrator can hold spot color in transparencies and simulate overprints, InDesign can too, so can CorelDRAW and you can get correct drop shadows in all of them even in spot color. Can't say, haven't used the new Quark to be able to say.
If you have more time and can ask someone on the web for help in a forum, you can get away from the problem if you find a shop which uses CorelDRAW. If you decide to try CorelDRAW and have problems with it, you could also ask me.
Last edited by sallybode; 14 May 2007 at 03:39 AM.
Every day's a new day, "draw" on what you've learned.
Sally M. Bode
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Kiwi
Bookmarks