Hi Richard,
SHORT ANSWER:
Double-click the Foreground color swatch in the toolbox to display the color Picker, Click the CUSTOM button, and select a PANTONE book from the drop down list at the top (most likely "PANTONE solid coated") and choose the red color you want. But this is not the optimal way to do what you want to do. If you want to know what it is, read through this message.
LONG ANSWER:
PANTONE is the name of a company which produces inks that are used as spot colors. Here’s a little bit of background to understand what the printing company is asking for and what a spot color is.
Why use SPOT colors? And what are they?
COST
Professional color printing is expensive. One axiom of printing is the more inks you use, the more it costs. That is why a black and white print job (1 ink: black) is so much cheaper than 4-color printing (4 inks: CMYK). If you have a simple logo that is only red white and black, it is more economical to
print using 2 inks… a black ink and a shade of red. Whenever you print with
black and some other color, that other color always is defined as a PANTONE color.
CONSISTENCY
Another reason why spot colors are so useful is because they are one of the easiest ways to be sure that you get the color you want when you print. After all, you can never expect that the color you see on the monitor screen is the color you get when you print. I’ll say that again in annoying all-caps just to underscore the point:
YOU CAN NEVER TRUST THAT THE COLORS YOU SEE ON YOUR MONITOR ARE THE ONES YOU WILL GET WHEN PRINTING.
Why? There are quite a number of reasons, but here’s a few… every device in a printing workflow has its own biases. For example, your monitor may be old, or new, which can affect the colors you see (let alone the possibility that you messed with the brightness levels of the monitor). Different monitor manufacturers produce monitors that output the same colors a little differently, and whether you’re on Mac or PC affects it too (all Mac monitors are literally brighter than PC monitors). And we have the same sorts of issues with printers… each different printer has its own settings, which may print slightly more blue-ish, or darker, or yellowish, etc. How recently you changed the print cartridge can affect the colors you get… Even the lighting in the room can affect the colors you perceive on the screen. And to top it all off, monitors represent colors using the RGB spectrum, while printers use CMYK. There is a wider range of colors in RGB than there is in CMYK which means you can literally make colors on the screen that can’t translate to print.
Is there any hope? That’s where spot colors come into play. Spot colors ensure color consistency because you’re not trying to match colors on a monitor.
The way it works is like this: If you go to a professional printing company, they should have several PANTONE swatchbooks on hand that have printed swatches of all the PANTONE colors there are. Different books for printing on different media such as solid coated, solid uncoated, pastels, metallic inks, etc. You thumb through and pick out the color you want, which is identified by a number (say PMS 353 C… PMS stands for PANTONE matching system). Once you have found the color that you want, you go back to Photoshop and specify that this is the color you want to use. You should NOT, however, try to determine which PANTONE color you want to use by choosing from the onscreen preview because, remember, you simply can’t trust the colors you see on the monitor. No matter what the color looks like on your monitor, you can be sure that, in the end, it’ll look exactly like the swatch you saw at the print studio. What the print company does is call up PANTONE and order a cartridge of your special color (say PMS 353 C) and install it in the printing press. That way, they’re printing the color using a premixed, consistent ink. When you print with CMYK, you are creating the colors using a mix of other colors, like making purple with red and blue. When you use a SPOT color, the ink is premixed… like using a purple crayon to get the shade of purple you want.
There are a few other problems… in order to actually apply a PANTONE color, you’ll have to make your image a duotone and use a spot color channel, which is pretty complicated. more than I can explain here. Also, neither GIFs or jpegs support PANTONE colors. Only psd or eps.
Lastly, I hate to tell you this, but a better application for creating logos is Adobe Illustrator, not Photoshop. Photoshop makes raster images which have a fixed resolution and lose quality when you resize them. Illustrator is a vector drawing program which defines objects mathematically so they won’t lose any quality or sharpness at all when resized. Your best option would be to create an eps graphic using Illustrator. That’s what the pros use.
Your easiest solution is probably just to use the files you’ve been using and go to a printer and ask to see a swatchbook so you can pick out the shade of red you want. But you won’t be able to apply it in Photoshop. Not to a GIF or jpeg. Perhaps the printer can do that for you.
hope this helps. Good luck.
—
John Mortenson
————————————————
http://www.jmort.com "Richard White" wrote in message
"Sanders" wrote in message
On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 18:24:46 +0100, "Richard White" wrote:
Hi,
I have a simple two-colour logo design which I have sent to printers as
both GIF (red on
transparent) and JPEG (red on yellow background).
With everyone else, when I send them an image file GIF/JPEG/TIFF or a
PDF they know what to do
with
it.
But these people have come back asking for the "Pantone colour" for the
Red I’m using.
I was using Adobe Image Ready 7.0, and have available Photoshop 7.0.1. In Image Ready (or alternatively Photoshop) *how* do I find the Pantone
code?
[…snipped…]
With the particular color Red set as your foreground color, double click
on
the foregound color swatch in your tools palette to bring up the Color Picker. Then click on Custom in the Picker and the Pantone colors will appear with the closest Pantone match indicated.
Errmm…. no … I get the colour selection "Color picker" window yes ….
"Pantone" doesn’t figure
in it anywhere! This is why I asked, since it was this screen I got
the HSB/RGB numbers from.
I’ve tried Photoshop (instead of Image Ready), and also now have "Lab" and
"CMYK" values.
Is either of these actually Pantone???
I neglected to mention that it would be prudent to click on the Book selection and select the particular Pantone set you want.
Where on earth is this "Book" selection? Can’t see Book on any of the
pull down menus.
Would appreciate any clarification – I need to get this Pantone number by
Monday!
Thanks
