Thread: Pantone Breakdowns

I haven't used FreeFlow =/
You may have to just work upstream a bit and make your changes at the design end of things.
Not the end of the world, if you have a good design team they should be able to adjust colors accurately based on your print output

Stiv
Xerox makes a Pantone book with call outs. Called Pantone digital chips for Xerox iGen3. I think it's about $800.
Hope this will help.
Jim

Here's the info if you are interested.

On the iGen3/FFPS system, assuming you do not have the ACQS software suite that is provided by Xerox Special Information Systems (XSIS), the Pantone CMYK Tables are static. These tables are simply text files that reside on the hard drive of the FFPS System. If you are familiar with navigating on a Solaris system, they can be found in the /var/spool/XRXnps/resources/color/tables directory on the sytem. There are both CMYK and Lab tables for coated, uncoated and GOEcoated Pantone colors. Whatever you do, you should not try to alter or remove the tables from this location. However, you can copy them out and format them in a way that would be suitable to provide to your customers.



On the iGen4/FFPS system, the tables are located in the same location, but are not static. When profiling on the FFPS system the user is given the choice to update the Spot color tables if so desired. If they chose to update them, then these files are modified with new CMYK values based on the scan results from the profiling process. If you update your destination profiles from the Color Maintenance Tool (CMT) on the Press Interface, then you are not given an option and the spot color tables are updated. However, at any time you can revert to the default CMYK Spot color values by opening the Spot Color List in the FFPS GUI. If the values have been updated by the profiling process, then a "Revert" button will appear at the bottom of the Spot Color List window.

NICE work Bud

So... how did this work out? I ask because if you have color management for cmyk to cmyk in your Freeflow then the device values you copied from the filesystems are correlated to how they would appear according to your destination profile. To assign a source profile to these cmyk values should cause color mismatches when reconverted back to destination.

The designer would have to pre-colormanage the entire document, in addition to the spot colors, and then you could turn off CMS at the rip.

It seems the easy, yet effective, thing to do would be to submit spot colors to the RIP and let it make the conversions.

Matt Louis

That's what I do.

(I'm a Fiery user) I let the Fiery match the spot color as best it can on its own (no profile change). And then adjust it accordingly in Fierys "spot-on" and print with "substitute colors" on.

As far as In-house design goes, Have your artists work in the widest color gamut available for your machine.
You'll hit everything in SWOP for sure (which is the designers/Adobe default profile) but why not get that extra color from Gracol6 or 7

I sometimes have to turn off Pantone processing due to transparency issues with the PDFs. This kills the Xerox iGen calibrated Pantone CMYK breakdowns and reverts to the profiles that I am using, correct?
So if I have the client set the spots to the iGen CMYK values, and change the spot to CMYK, then I should be good no matter what, yes or no?
As far as Gracol 6 or 7, I don't have those profiles in my FreeFlow RIP.
Am I nuts?

My fiery/machine has pre-set formulas for Pantone colors (assuming they are spot colored properly in the document). These values vary slightly from the CMYK values/equivalents , these variations supposedly give you closer matches.

If you were to remove the spot color values and replace them with CMYK values, my machine would not know its trying to hit a pantone. It will probably be close , but not AS close as if i had spot colored the job. Also if i took the time to match this pantone in the past (and saved it as a substitute color) all that time would go out the window if i changed it to CYMK.

I'm sure if this is the same for FreeFlow on an IGEN. As for Gracol not being on your RIP, your not nuts. 90% of the time the customer is not using that profile anyway, and if your designers aren't using it, there is no gain from having it in the RIP. Heck , i didn't know much of anything about color profiles until a year or so ago. Canon's senior color analysts in NYC trained me. The man is profound in knowledge of color on these digital machines.