matching color on DI

banjoman

Well-known member
Anyone using a PTEK 34DI that can shed some light on matching certain pantone colors like 185 red or 1585 orange, the orange and red allwas come out dirty looking, also have some troubles with yellows and certain blues and greens. most of the stuff we print looks great but some jobs that we used to print on our 2 color with pantone inks are giving us trouble matching the colors.

banjomaniac in NC
 
Have you compared to output to a Pantone Bridge? Some spot colors will never match when process printed. If you need to match a Pantone 185 then you need to print with a Pantone 185 ink, not CMYK. It has nothing to do with the press, it's the nature of the color beast.
 
matching color on DI

If you have a professional profiling solution (such as MonacoPROFILER or ProfileMaker), and you have color managed your digital press, use can use the profile to create a custom process build for almost any spot-color, automatically. When you create a custom process build - or a library of custom builds (for example....for the entire Pantone coated library) - you will get the most accurate color reproduction possible. The same tools that create these builds often tell you what dE to expect, which should give you a better idea of the limitations related to ink and media. To better visualize this kind of color difference, I would also recommend using analysis tools such as Colorthink, which can graphically display the spot color value relative to the capabilities of your DI Press.
 
Anyone using a PTEK 34DI that can shed some light on matching certain pantone colors like 185 red or 1585 orange, the orange and red always come out dirty looking, also have some troubles with yellows and certain blues and greens. most of the stuff we print looks great but some jobs that we used to print on our 2 color with pantone inks are giving us trouble matching the colors.

banjomaniac in NC

I think the original poster was trying to match a colour from the Pantone book printing from Pantone inks on his DI. (I think)

When we first got our Heidelberg DI Pro, we had this problem too. Assuming that rollers and press got a good washup from CMYK jobs running prior, try checking your ink mix. We were using spot colour inks from Toyo and got horrible results. We complained to the ink techs and turns out you can't go by the formula on the Pantone colour charts. They gave us a program on a CD which calculated the correct mix formulas using Toyo primary inks. Works better with the new formulas but we eventually switched to Sun for spot colours. We still run Toyo CMYK inks as they're the best we've tested.
 

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