How does this Pantomne color system work?

[LenHewitt]

Whitmark,

Pantone spot inks are used:

1) Where a job is only to be printed in 1,2 or 3 specific colours and
2) Where colours are required that are not available from CMYK printing. In
this case they will often be used in addition to the normal CMYK inks.

In Photoshop, reference to Pantone inks will only be retained when:

1) The image is a duotone file saved as Photoshop EPS or
2) Used in spot colour channels created from the channels palette and the
file saved as DCS2 EPS files.

In all other cases the Pantone will be converted to the nearest CMYK (or
RGB) colour available in the working colour space being used.

There is no reason to use Pantone colours unless the job is being printed by
separations on a professional press.

[Phosphor]

The beauty of the Pantone System (and there are other regimented color systems as well) is that when properly administered, everybody, from some bloke on the street with a printable idea, to the designer, to the prepress operators, to the art director to the press operator will all have a universal standard to refer to, so that they will ALL know what the final color is supposed to look like, the whole way through the idea-to-final-product process. This is and can be and should be part of a fully color-managed workflow, for anyone who is serious about their work and their craft. If you come in and ask me to print a logo using a particular Pantone color, I—and everyone down through the production heirarchy— will be doing our best to match that exact color that you have decided upon, because we all have access to the same quantified references. If all goes well, the final product returned to you will very closely match the color you picked, here at my desk.

[Colin Walls]

What nobody pointed out is that if you are working on photos, using RGB or printing yourself on an inkjet, Pantone colours are not really relevant to you at all.

[Kelli Aylesworth]

The company I work for is, well, cheap, and we can't always afford Pantone Spot colors for our printed pieces. We did, however, discover a swatch book when we bought the whole new package of Pantone books that will give the Pantone Color and then the CMYK version of that color. They are often not exact matches, but you can get a good idea of what you want from them, and your printer can use those to match with, as well. It's the Solid to Process book, I believe.

[Don McCahill]

Many companies (not the cheap ones mentioned above) do not want their corporate colors rendered in CMYK, even if there is an exact match.

The reason is that the CMYK creates an illustion of color, not a true color, by a rosette of dots of the four colors in different intensities.

To a good designer, the ability to run the corporate color with a flat ink, rather than a pattern of dots, is important to the look of the piece.

It was once common for printers to have a four color press as "the big one" now six and eight color presses exist, so that Pantone colors can be added (as well as varnishes and hexachrome jobs).

[John Slate]

To add to Don's sage advice, using a spot ink also eliminates the potential of misregistration.

[Gustavo Sanchez]

Though there's a bit of discredit in the use of Pantone colours as a reference for matching colours because of the wrong attitudes that have been mentioned, there's one good point that Kelli referred marginally to.

That is, they provide some general method of referencing colours and shades. It's much better to say 'something like Pantone 200-C' than 'that burgundy that Max has in its carpet, y'know?'.

If you take that as a loose reference and you don't overexpect magic things to happen, then the Pantone system (or any other one) can be very useful as a basic common language.