Back to Dye Printing Tricks & Tips
Pantone spot colors tried desperately to be accurate and well pleasing. They printed up guides to show you all their colors. Then they went further and gave you color chips to compare on coated paper and uncoated. Now that very few graphic artists are specing color with paste-up boards, rubylith overlays, and taped on Pantone Color chips, the available libraries have become almost annoyingly precise.
In various graphic and layout applications you can now choose colors other than Blue, Green, and Red. A pulldown menu away gets you Pantone (and Hexachrome and Trumatch and Munsell and...) libraries full of colors. Every color you pull from any of those libraries is like attaching a color chip to your paste-up board. If you think you are printing a two color job, and you use Reflex Blue CVU, Black, and TruMatch 38-b7, and Reflex Blue CVC you are asking for a four color job. But all the blues look alike, right? And two of them are almost identically named!!
NOPE.
When film is run you will get color separations for each ink used. The printer will charge you for those.
Plan ahead. Pick the color you want. Import it from your color menu. If you are using a duotone, create that first and import it into your graphics or layout program. Then your color menu will reflect what you created (and it does have to be precisely the same name) for each ink. If you are using various logos or art from another source, be aware that a logo created some years ago may be labeled PMS #300 which the computer will not recognize as Pantone 300, or Pantone 300CV or Pantone 300 CV (yeah, spaces between letters count too).
Find out if the artwork has mystery or phantom colors. In FreeHand this is simple; Go up to Xtras (not Windows>Xtras), and pull down to "Colors" where you will have control for "Name All Colors." This will give you everything actually used. Under Xtras>Delete>Delete Unused Named Colors you can weed out a bunch of clipart induced colors. With the offending color highlighted in the color list, go up to the option key and pull down to "Replace." From there you can choose to replace a Trumatch color with a standard Pantone.
From PageMaker use the >Utilies>Define Colors method.
From InDesign use the Swatch's Palette flyout menu to Select Unused and then Delete Swatch commands.
Just love all those Trumatch shades? Got to use them? I know a big ad agency that used a specific tint accidentally. They just loved it, even if it wasn't available locally. Get with your printer first to see if they use Trumatch inks. Chances are you can substitute something or even let them custom mix you a batch for a high price. (Still in love with that one special shade of orange now?)
ANPA (American Newspaper Publisher's Association). These are colors that successfully print on newsprint. Contact your publisher before you start sorting through this list of colors to see if they still use the same library!
CRAYON. Yep, the Crayola people got their color library in there! It's pretty neat. All the colors you are used to using in the names you remember: Maize, Spring Green, Periwinkle. Use them, then convert them to the CMYK equivalents before you take them to your printer. (Unless you want to look like you have a third-grade level of printer expertise...)
DIC Color Guide (Dainippon Ink and Chemicals, Inc.). A Japanese system rarely used out of country.
FOCOLTONE. A British system that uses a cool process CMYK combination matrix that takes care of most trapping problems. Again, not well known off the island.
MUNSELL. Another highly organized color system, but your printer may never have heard of it.
PANTONE. An American standard for Coated, Uncoated, Process (CMYK equivalents), Tints, Metallics and Varnished Metallics.
PANTONE HEXACHROME. An offshoot of Pantone that creates colors from a hi-fidelity mix of the "Six" process colors: Cyan Magenta, Yellow, Black, and Orange and Green. Check with your printer to see if they even deal with it. Be prepared to pay for a SIX color job.
TOYO. Another Japanese color library not used much off the island.
TRUMATCH. A really cool, highly organized system of 2000 CMYK colors. Great for designers who can only live with a specific shade. Bad for anyone else hoping to print from it...