HP Indigo 5600 Digital Press prepress color matching issues

Hi guys, first of all thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

At my current business I have been assigned the new task of Prepress Operations. I have experience and education with graphic design but mainly for web format so print preparation is new to me.


-The printer is a HP Indigo 5600 Digital Press.

-The material being printed on is a 12 mil Indigo coated plastic substrate.

-The software using to create the image and define and manage color is Adobe Illustrator.

-I am using an iPro2 scanner to create ICC profiles for the printer.

-I am using an x-rite spectrodensitometer to verify printed colors.


I have created a template to print out different colored cards. I have defined each card cell with the CMYK values of the requested Pantone colors that I retrieved from Pantone's website. I exported the image as a pdf a few different ways. The attached photos show the defined CMYK values that I input for each cell as well as the corresponding Pantone Numbers. In parenthesis are the pantone values that i got from scanning the printed core with a spectrodensitometer. The first image does not have any color conversion done on export of the PDF. The second image shows the values retrieved when the PDF had been exported with an ICC profile created by scanning color swatch charts provided by the xrite software, and printed on the HP printer. If you look at the numbers on the images provided, you can see, that for some reason only 5 of the 20 colors defined actually match the defined value input.


I need assistance in figuring out how to get the colors I define in illustrator to match the colors printed out. Once again any assistance is appreciated. Please let me know if more information is needed.


#1-No ICC Profile used when exporting(color values in parenthesis are the color values that actually printed



#2-ICC Profile used when exporting(color values in parenthesis are the color values that actually printed