Illustrator Color Panel
This is the second in Jhon nate's series on spot color, Which began in the July/August 2010 issue.
Illustrator Colour Panel :
Figure 1 shows the color panel from ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR and reflects the color of an object selected, in this case pantone 485 coated. Clicking on the icon "A" will convert the selected color to CMYK equivalaents. The problem is that, by default. You may not get the results you want. Clicking on the fly-over menu from the swatches panel allows you to select the "SPOT COLORS" option. Figure 3 shows the default setting illustrator uses for spot color conversion. The manufacturer, Pantone, Supplies both CMYK values for each color in the library. By default illustrator uses the CMYK values.
Assigning an ICC profile to the document such as US web coated SWOP and then clicking the "A" icon show in figure 1 will result in the color being converted to the manufaturer's supplied CMYK value . Assiging a different ICC profile, such as the SNAP profile, will result in the same CMYK conversion. This is a problem since the result of printing this CMYK "RECIPE" will look quite different if printed on two presses, one printing to the SWOP standard and the other to the SNAP standard.
Device - Dependent :
CMYK is known as a device dependent color space, meaning that the same CMYK values printed on different devices will result in visually different results. A press printing on newsprint will print differently than the same press printing on a coated stock, which will also differ from the result from an inkjet printer. Therefore, Illustrator's CMYK value will look different on each device. It may look accurate on one device and completely different on another or it might be inaccurate on both. The worst - case scenario is that the proof will not match the printed piece resulting in an unhappy client.
Referring back to the "SPOT COLORS" option from the swatches panel you can see that we have another option available for converting our spot colors. The second option is to use the manufacturer's supplied value for the conversion. When this option is selected, illustrator will use the assigned ICC profile in conjunction with the value when performing the conversion.
Device Independent :
On the other hand, color space is a device independent color space. The value represents what the color will look like. No matter which device the color is printed on , it should look like the value. Converting our pantone 485 coated spot color using the setting and the SNAP ICC Profile assigned to the document will result in the CMYK values shown in figure 8. As you can see, these values are different from the values shown in figure 5. The results have now been automatically set to the proper CMYK "RECIPE" needed to ensure that the color reproduction matches, as closely as possible, the pantone reference swatch.....
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Adobe Illustrator
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