PANTONE PLUS Digital Libraries for Adobe Creative Suite

[chevalier]

Graphics - PANTONE PLUS Digital Libraries for Adobe

I've started receiving jobs utilizing Pantone Plus colors. The design agencies we've been dealing with are guesstimating CMYK values to these and make custom spot colors. FUN STUFF when the customer starts saying hey that isn't the color from the designers proofs. Everyone seems unaware that there are new libraries available with LAB only equivalents directly from Pantone.

Figured I would share the love.

[chevalier]

I had my first major issue today with the new library. I have a PSD with a Pantone 874 C channel that would not place into Illustrator. Every time I attempted to open the document with the link I got an error "file is unreadable". I was troubleshooting this for half of the day today trying to figure out why a PSD that worked a month ago won't place now in Illustrator. By process of elimination I finally changed the spot color channel in the Photoshop document to the + library from the previous C library and voilà the file became placable in Illustrator again.

I'm fairly certain this is an Adobe issue and not a Pantone issue. If I had created my own custom spot color libraries that were inconsistent between programs I wouldn't expect to get an error saying that the file was generically unreadable.

[mglouis]

Here's some Friday fun:

PMS 2747

per Adobe Photoshop v12 "Pantone Solid Coated"
L* 17 a*17 b*-54

per Colormunki "Pantone+ Solid Coated.cxf" library
L* 13.691 a* 21.787 b* -54.478

My actual book as measured with a Xrite 508
L* 13.43 a* 21.31 b* -54.36

dE76 = 5.84 (Adobe licensed valies to my book)

dE76 = 5.61 (Adobe licensed values to Colormunki CFX)

dE76 = 0.56 (colormunki values to my book)

We have a few RIPs and the CIElab values are different between those too. We have another RIP with hardwired CMYK values that happen to match the alternate cmyk values for any given spot color per Adobe Illustrator v15 I have seen a chocolate brown print as army green merely by using these values and printing to Gracol.

- Matt Louis

[tobiv]

@chevalier: maybe it's an adobe issue, but to solve this problem you can put the original color library back into illustrator color files folder inside the presets folder. the pantone installer pkg moves them to a backup folder in your applications folder. they say a spot color can only have one reference data point in illu [1], but form my daly experience i have to say both files are necessary, otherwise you run into this «not readable» error. we get a lot of artworks from our customer and after installing P+ (for one artwork) it was like hell... i lost several hours to get it working again and to come to this conclusion.

[1] The reason that the PANTONE Color Libraries that had been built into Illustrator need to be removed and replaced with the PANTONE PLUS Color Libraries is that, in Illustrator, a PANTONE Color can only have one data point with which it is associated. In the short term, in order to benefit from the new colors and data associated in PLUS, the PANTONE Libraries that are installed with Adobe Illustrator are removed and replaced with the new PLUS Libraries.
<- this is in my opinion totally bogus...

[mglouis]

This thread has been eye opening for me. I got a new PANTONE+ book a few months ago and assumed the main difference was in the organization of the fan books. A moment ago I downloaded the PANTONE+ libraries for CS5 and NOW I realize that Pantone has changed the CIElab values for their libraries.

I have two colors in terms of CIElab for "PANTONE 2747 C" within the same application (e.g. Photoshop).

How is this a good thing?

- Matt Louis