working with Pantone colours and Illu

[wonderings]

Well there is a project that could do Pantone or CMYK. But I haven’t decided yet which of the two. I was just thinking of getting ready, incase the client decides to go with Pantone.

Most go with CMYK when they compare the price of a CMYK + Pantone job to a straight forward CMYK job.

 

[nebojsak]

Common use of Pantone is in packaging design, for logos and some distinctive areas/shapes. POS material, flyers, catalogues and stuff is mostly (if not entirely) CMYK.

 

[MacGizmo]

I use Pantone colors all the time for setting up base colors in designs... but I can't remember the last time I actually used them to produce a final printed product. Most clients don't care enough about the exact color reproduction and prefer to save the cost by just printing in CMYK.

 

[organicCPU]

I have a hard time imagining Indesign and Illustrator without the Pantone swatches and libraries, will take some adjustment for sure and work arounds as pantones are still regularly used in print shops.

As I'm still working with Adobe CS6, I didn't get color swatch updates from Adobe for years. What worked for me so far, was to export the swatches from Pantone Color Manager and import them to Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. To unlock and use the app, download it and enter one or more valid serial numbers from the color swatch guides, that you bought. Maybe the app will be discontinued, but for now it still works.

Remember that a solid color definition is nothing else than a chosen color for display purposes and a name like "PANTONE 2296 C", that you can set up easily by yourself in any graphics app that supports solid colors. So the printer knows what color to mix and use for your artwork. It's still a manual process and has nothing to do with some magic by Adobe or Pantone. Just select a color from the physical guide and set up a new color with a descriptive name like "PMS 2296 C", "Pantone 2296 U" and the printer should know what to do. Usually you have no need for all 15k definitions from Pantone that you can find in some Adobe or Serif apps.

It's a pity that Pantone doesn't offer the free Color Finder anymore on its website. It always has been a great help doing color conversions from Pantone to CMYK and vice versa. If anyone has already been checking out the new Pantone Connect, I'm interested in a review here in the forum, especially if there are still different suggestions for color conversions included, too. Pantone is offering a 3 month free access license with the purchase of new qualifying color guides.