Enigmatic purples have long been symbolic of counterculture, unconventionality, and artistic brilliance.
Tagged: Pantone
PANTONE Fashion Color Report Spring 2017
A Mixture of Vitality, Relaxation and the Great Outdoors
From colors that are bright and vivid to those that convey a sense of earthiness, our top 10 colors for spring 2017 are reminiscent of the hues that surround us in nature.
Take a look at Pantone’s Spring 2017 Fashion Color Report.
Pantone 2015 Color of the Year: Marsala
Quickly find the CMYK equivalent of a Pantone color in Photoshop or Illustrator
Many times you are asked to find the CMYK equivalent of a particular Pantone color. If you don’t have a ridiculously overpriced Pantone to Process conversion guide available, you can use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
There are a lot of theories out there as to how you can get the most accurate CMYK values (some area quite complex, such as first converting to LAB color before converting to process colors, etc.). But if you’re a pro you already realize that no Pantone color is going to match 100% in process printing anyway and the Pantone Color Bridge guide is the best and most accurate conversion method.
The Pantone Color Bridge Guide is expensive, so these are the fastest ways that I’ve come across that give the best results. (more…)
InDesign CS6 Pantone+ color glitch: a workaround
If you try to get Pantone 543 (or a number of other Pantone colors) in Adobe InDesign CS6’s Color panel, you’ve likely run into an annoying glitch. You simply can’t find it by typing it in as you could with CS5.
InDesign Secrets describes the CS6 Pantone+ glitch in detail, and offers some workarounds.
What I find most annoying about this glitch is that Adobe hasn’t fixed it with a small update yet, and that Pantone doesn’t make the older libraries available for easy download. Hopefully, the new InDesign CC (due to ship later this month) fixes the problem.
Pantone Turns iPhone into Color Studio on the Go
myPANTONE, an iPhone application, offers graphic, digital, multimedia, fashion, interior and industrial designers the freedom to capture, create and share PANTONE Color Palettes – wherever they go and whenever they find inspiration. With myPANTONE, designers have access to all the PANTONE Color Libraries, including the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM for coated, uncoated and matte stock; the PANTONE Goe System for coated and uncoated stock; PANTONE PASTELS for coated and uncoated stock; and the PANTONE FASHION + HOME SMART Color System. The application also enables designers to easily create harmonious color palettes by finding complementary, analogous and triadic combinations for selected colors. myPANTONE takes advantage of the iPhone’s built-in camera to let designers capture whatever inspires them – from architecture and street scenes to fashion and nature. Colors can be extracted from any photo on the iPhone and then matched to the closest PANTONE Colors. Color palettes can be emailed to colleagues and clients as color patches, or as application-ready swatch files for use in design applications including Adobe Creative Suite (.ase), CorelDraw and QuarkXPress. You can purchase the myPANTONE application for $9.99 from Apple’s iPhone App Store, for use on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Quick and easy color management with Pantone ColorMunki
One of the most difficult aspects of graphic design is color management. It’s one of those things you know you should do, but often overwhelms all but the most expert of users. Thankfully, Pantone offers ColorMunki Design, a suite of hardware/software tools for designers and digital photographers to ensure accurate color from design to output. I recently wrote a full review of Pantone ColorMunki for Macworld, where I found that ColorMunki not only makes color calibration of your display and printer easy, but capturing colors from any substrate you can think of a snap! (more…)
Pantone Goe System libraries available for Adobe Creative Suite
If you recall reading my announcement of the Pantone Goe System back in September of 2007, you’ll be happy to know that you can now download the entire Pantone Goe System color libraries for Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop from the Pantone Web site. The free download requires you to register with an annoying amount of personal information (address, phone number, etc…) but I guess that’s the price we pay for being on the cutting edge. That being said, I haven’t come across any printers or designers using the Goe System as of yet, so there’s probably no rush. Still, it’s nice to have nearly double the amount of Pantone colors available.
Duotone support in Adobe Illustrator
Adobe brought transparency to the Illustrator world back with version 9. One of the many complaints about the poor-selling AI9 (and believe me, if you used it, you could see why nobody liked it after only 5 minutes of use!) was the inability of linked spot color EPS photos to interact with all the transparency features. In order for the Pantone colors to output correctly, you HAD to embed the photo in AI, which resulted in absolutely huge file sizes and a pretty decent wait while the file saved. If you forgot to embed the photo, AI would output it as a CMYK or RGB image, depending on what document color space you were in. Illustrator finally fixed this with version 11 (Illustrator CS). You can now link spot color EPS images into AI and not embed them – Even if you have an object with a drop shadow on top of it. This is great because you can keep a more modular workflow this way. Of course, there are very few instances where I would use a placed photo in Illustrator to begin with (at least in the advertising design business anyway). But, this is one old habit I’m happy to say I can finally break!