[cairo] Spot colors (and CMYK)

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 23, 2010, at 6:58 PM, Bill Spitzak wrote:

> I'm still confused. Does a "profile" contain a translation from every possible spot color to CMYK?

No.

There are essentially no "named-color profiles" floating around, or used by anything. This particular class of ICC profile is essentially dead as far as I can tell. Every library containing spot colors is in a proprietary format of some sort.

These library files are organized into categories, for example: matte, coated, and uncoated Pantone spot colors are all separate library files. Pantone 206 on coated paper is a different color than Pantone 206 on matte. So the different libraries contain both different CMYK and LAB equivalents.

The recent trend is that solid color libraries (spot color itself) are LAB only and do not contain CMYK equivalents. Only the "solid to process" library file contains CMYK, and only CMYK not LAB.


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