Free color resource bringing designers and printers together
A spin-off of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, Friendsgiving is a celebration of friendships where friends and neighbors gather for the holiday rather than immediate family. This event is about spending a non-stress dinner with your best buds and without the family drama or arguments about what style of turkey, stuffing, or cranberry sauce is best.
Marring the season of sharing is the drama between Adobe and Pantone. Adobe wants Pantone to bring something specific to the gathering and Pantone wants total control and to charge admission for the event. Since they cannot get along, Pantone and Adobe cancelled the party and all the colorful consumables that with them. In this, fairly tortured, analogy I’m talking about Pantone and Adobe’s decision to phase out availability of color via Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. Thus leaving designers with outdated color books:
- Pantone + CMYK Coated
- Pantone + CMYK Uncoated
- Pantone + Metallic Coated
Pantone mentions Adobe Illustrator will still honor swatches placed from discontinued libraries, but the question is for how long. In Adobe Photoshop layered bitmaps, Pantone colors will be and currently are (if you have the Cloud update) grayed out. Illustrator files with place-linked Photoshop files that use spot channels now render Gray/Black in Illustrator when colors from Color books are no longer available.
This rift has added drama and discontent to the entire community leaving designers and printers disconnected. Pantone has been a standard reference between designers and printers regardless of offset, flexo, inkjet or toner. Even though the accuracy of printed Pantone reference books is highly questionable, the named and numbered color values have become the de facto reference ensuring all parties are referring to the same color.
In the last 10 years, industry color RIPS have integrated look up tables to accurately convert spot color assignments from L*a*b* values into CMYK process recipes based on the target color space of the device. This automation is especially important within the inkjet print industry where non-ISO standard process color values are used. Inkjet uses a different CMYK recipe to simulate the same color target on different inkjet devices. Look-up tables using L*a*b* to custom CMYK recipes provide closer color translation from the designer to the printer. With designers no longer able to access those color translations from within their design software, they either need to pay for new services or suffer the consequences of inaccurate color specification.
Some not-so-great recipes
Various internet sites have begun offering .ase color libraries with generic spot color names or CMYK recipes. Using generic names for spot colors will slow a printer’s automated process of color replacement if the color name is not listed in the look up table. If a name is not found it will replace and use the CMYK value of that color. Note that this process color recipe may not be correct for the inkjet ink set, creating an incorrect color simulation as well as a bottle neck for prepress or the DFE (digital front end) on the press.
Big design agencies and print sites have succumbed to Pantone’s subscription requirements, but the ones hurt the most are the independent designers who have less income to offset the extra Pantone costs on top of the subscription model which Adobe incorporated years back. To get around this, designers may make the colors on their own assigning CMYK recipes from the printed pantone books. Let me say again, this process will not simulate the target color accurately when working across different inkjet technology.
Getting a free and colorful meal
Although Pantone’s library is missing from Adobe products, custom color Adobe libraries are legal to share. These .ase (Adobe Swatch Exchange) files are independent from the Pantone link and can be imported within Illustrator and In-Design without the fear they will be automatically removed. I previously wrote about how to download these files ahead of the Pantone/Adobe divorce date. But many designers were not prepared.
To celebrate the Friendsgiving season with our Inkjet Insight community, I have made my own (spot/cmyk,L*a*b*) .ase color libraries available for use by designers compatible for auto replacement in industry inkjet RIPs. Because in the design and inkjet industry, sharing is caring.
You can download this free .zip file at the end of this post. The .zip file contains a vast library of spot color libraries in .ase format ready to use in Illustrator or InDesign. Once they are downloaded, follow these instructions for use in your Adobe design environment:
- Launch: Illustrator
- Select: Window/Swatch Libraries/Other Libraries
- Direct to the folder with the .ase files
- Select: Window/Swatch Libraries/Other Libraries
- Launch: InDesign
- Select: Window/Color/Swatches
- Select: in the upper right swatch window
- Select: Load Swatches
- Direct to the folder with the .ase files
- For each program, this folder does not need to reside within adobe programs and should be backed up for safe keeping
Everything we do at inkjet Insight is about enabling designers and printing companies to deliver greater quality and productivity with inkjet. I hope sharing these color libraries will help bring designers and printers together at the table again. Meanwhile, we’ll keep evaluating new solutions for color matching that will prevent one Grinch from ruining the holiday. Wait, I think I’m getting my holidays mixed up. That’s okay, you can associate this free gift with whatever holiday you choose..
Have a colorful holiday season my friends.
