[cairo] Spot colors (and CMYK)

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 20, 2010, at 8:55 PM, ecir hana wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 3:36 AM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Feb 20, 2010, at 6:31 PM, ecir hana wrote:
>>> 
>>> What's useless about having a spot alternative defined in CMYK? I
>>> thought it's great - if the spot is unavailable you could still easily
>>> print it. It also helps with blending (as in multiply).
>> 
>> You might as well print it with hatch marks because it has no correlation whatever with the original color.
> 
> I don't agree - to me it seems useful enough. And it's what Acrobat
> does and it's super simple (as it's the same space as the target
> printer there would be no need to decode LAB values), after all.
> Besides, for press (CMYK) you wont get better precision than this, no
> matter what space you would define the alternative in.

I'm not pleased with how Acrobat soft proofs compared to say InDesign, when overprint preview is enabled. When enabled, ID uses LAB equivalents of Pantone colors, not CMYK equivalents.

For press, you wouldn't use Pantone solid to process if you're a content creator with awareness. You'd use a process color guide from either Pantone or Trumatch, so that you aren't specifying colors that can't be printed in the first place.


Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
New York, NY
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Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Ed"