"peter" wrote in message
I am trying to duplicate a specific shade of green. All I have is a hard copy of a brochure. I naively hoped I could scan in the brochure and get the info from a sample in Photoshop. It didn’t work. Is there any way I can do this besides visually comparing the greens? I am sending a business card design to a printing company and really want the greens to match as closely as possible.
As someone mentioned, the best method is to send the original brocure that you want to match along with the job. Printers and prepress folks do this sort of matching all the time and they will get it right.
One very common way to match a color that way is to get hold of a Pantone swatch book, and visually match up the card with one of Pantone’s spot colors. Be sure to distinguish between coated and uncoated.
Another way is to scan it with a colorimeter or spectrophotometer, and match the numeric color values to a spot color. Using a scanner for this purposes is not dependable because it depends not only on the calibration of your scanner (if any) but the characteristics of the scanner light source.
A fourth method – much less accurate than the first two – is to calibrate your monitor, and then match the scanned color to one of the solid coated or uncoated Pantone swatches in Photoshop’s color picker. Click the "Color Libraries" button in the picker dialog to access this. I don’t recommend this method because you are completely dependent on the accuracy of your monitor calibration and the viewing conditions of your desk area. —
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/