Pantone Color palette Spot Colors Printing Settings and How to set Spot colors from CMYK or RGB color swatches in Illustrator.

Not sure how RGB, CMYK and Pantone Color palette Spot Colors work yet? You wish to use the color swatches from Pantone in CMYK or RGB color system values? Let me show you how this system works.

Basically when filled in the Pantone color values of CMYK in the Adobe Ilustrator, Photoshop or other software, colors looks quite dull from the presented by PANTONE. The question is: Will this be different from screen when printed out?

Pantone Colors Prints different than on screen

Yes it will look different when printed from the artwork you have created and see on your screen and you will find online. 

The first thing is the monitors how they display colors on screen and the true is, no calibration is made generaly. It looks different from screen to screen, from printed material, or even from the exact Pantone colors printed.

There has been trouble many years with the Pantone colors used and its displaying on monitors or printed on paper.

What are Pantone Colours? Find out an Introduction to the Pantone colour system video at the end.

Pantone Colors in Various Color Spaces

That is is why the PANTONE Company provide “close recommended” values of the colors like in this case Pantone 17-1564 Fiesta for display/online (RGB 221, 77, 67 & HEX #de4d44 – HEX is the code number for colors in computer apps and coding on websites).

And the print values in CMYK (CMYK 4, 81, 70, 1 – Where C-Cyan, M-Magenta, Y-Yellow, K-Black).

If you need the colors printed from Illustrator exactly as appeared on Pantone swatches printed samples, you need to print your artwork in Pantone colors. Not RGB or CMYK.

Colors that were prepared in color spaces like RGB or for print into CMYK, will always look slightly different from original Pantone color. This is because of the color mixing and mostly of the white color that paper represents.

PANTONE Color Swatch Formula Guide

If you in need exact match of the colors to something you already have, find that colors on paper in PANTONE color swatch Formula Guide. These Printed formulas should be available at  the print house close to you, to select the color of your desire.

Than you need to set your artwork with these colors, that needs to stay PANTONE Spot color. (See the blue line where you need to change it in Swatch Options from Process Color to Spot Color)

As you can see, there is now a dot/spot in the bottom right corner in your colors in Swatches:

Check out the latest Pantone color palette swatches here.

How the Pantone Color palette Spot Colors Printing works?

So when printed into Adobe Postscript file, you will see this in the dialog below.
Simpledits in © PANTONE 19-1862 Jester Red.
.com in © PANTONE 17-1564 Fiesta in Document Ink Option as the last two colors. The little printer in front of these Pantone colors means that only this two colors will be printed

Do you see them in Document Ink with printers on left? These are Pantone colors ready to print in Pantone colors scale. You have to ask you print house to print your artwork in Pantone colors, otherwise the basic printing is converted into RGB and CMYK always.

If you wish to see and check this Illustrator file, let me know so I can send you the Illustrator file for you the difference between CMYK and Pantone colors made in swatches.

Let me know if I you use the Pantone color swatches as Spot colors or just for coloring your photos.

PANTONE© and other Pantone trademarks are the property of Pantone LLC.