Re: L.a.b. Values of Pantone 485
@ Brad
I do appreciate why you would like a valid source that would provide indisputable LAB values for all Pantone colors.
Yes, well, if you read item 15, you now know that Pantone protects this information for what they probably feel are valid business reasons.
I do not work for or represent Pantone, but will share that perhaps it might make the best sense for you to buy the Pantone Color Cue 2 devive.
Four Pantone libraries, suited to different professions, or around 9,000 colors, are preinstalled. Readings can be saved and converted to different color spaces, including CMYK, sRGB, HTML, Lab, and XYZ, while you can record a two second sound byte reminder for each color being saved.
so.. having said that...
While I fully appreciate your very logical desire of using your spectrophotometer to measure either a printed pantone swatch in a fan book...
-- or a press sheet ...
and have them magically match the values you read in your applications....
That may be a bit of wishful thinking !
The Pantone books, like any other printed material, vary a little from book to book.
In addition to that, each color with shiftover time differently - this difference with shift over time as it is exposed to light - light is indeed destructive, as I am sure you have seen first hand when viewing any menu displayed in the store front window of an Asian restaurant - the pigment used to make Magenta-ish colors often degrade to nothing much faster than the others...
Pantone does quite a bit of testing related to this, placing printed sheets under different ligting conditions and measuring them after a period of time - this is why you will always be advised to never leave you pantone books exposed to light - that is, use them, then put them into a light-safe drawer or case.
now a quick word about getting Adobe Applications to behave the same...
I have learned the following from a friend at Adobe.
"Adobe is supplied a single set of libraries from Pantone which have the alternate values available in various ways (CMYK, LAB, etc) and each application chooses the alternate that makes the most sense for it. ID and Acrobat uses LAB, since they have a rich color model. Illustrator uses CMYK, since it doesn’t."
okay, to further expand on that, I discovered the following Technical note at the Adobe web site...
[http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=325905|
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=325905]
from the above link;
330728: CMYK values of PANTONE swatches are different in Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS
You must set InDesign CS3 and CS2 and Illustrator CS3 and CS2 to use Lab values that are in the library; this is not the default setting for either application. When you set InDesign CS3 and CS2 and Illustrator CS3 and CS2 to use the Lab values, you can encode alternate colors for spot colors using the same Lab values. If spot colors are converted to process colors, then Illustrator CS3 and CS2 and InDesign CS3 and CS2 convert those Lab values to CMYK using the Profile selected at print time or using the document profile if the conversion-to process happens before print.
There is no setting to use Lab values in Illustrator or InDesign in versions earlier than CS2. Neither application used different Lab Pantone values; both were designed to use the Pantone CMYK values to define color appearance, while Photoshop uses Lab. This was changed In InDesign and Illustrator CS2.
Okay, that is all the time i can spend on this, hope that helped !