Printing closer to pantone...

Does someone know how to print a Pantone color on an inkjet printer, and keep the color as accurate as possible?

I’m working on assignments where the main condition is to use only one color (monotone) other than black (Pantone). The project look nice on screen and the color is really close to what I seen on the Pantone swatch book.

But when I print this on my inkjet (Canon S600) the color is not right. Is there a way to calibrate my printer to get better results... or something I should do with my documents?

Ps- Im using PANTONE 725 CVC (Solid Coated)

I dont think so. Because printers print with CMYK, it would do its conversion, thus you losing the exact Pantone you have used. I am curious though. I wonder if you could buy Pantone ink cartridges? If it isnt a highend printer it would surely be a waste of money. If I had to make a guess, I would try setting up two documents in Photoshop. Fill one with your Pantone, then try dialing in CMYK values till it looks similar in the other document. I suppose it would be a lot of extra work but it may work.

I'm not an expert, but have a lot of time spent in getting color predictable at work (not 100% match, but close). If color managment is new to you, don't waste your time with getting a pantone color to look right... you have a bigger color issue to deal with. There are a number of places to go to set up a color workflow for your computer/printer. Start with your printer's web site. You should calibrate your monitor so it is giving you good color. Then using color profiles for your printer and testing the different possible settings, you should be able to get a print that resemble your monitor.

When I am doing concept work in a program like Quark, I would always have to convert the Pantone colors to a CMYK version and visually match them on the screen. Then our laser printer would give me a decent representation. And we had some major color problems when we printed Quark files on an inkjet type printer without a postscript RIP. See, Quark is a postscript based program and regular old inkjet printers are not postscript printers. A hardware or software RIP is needed.

Picking a color in PS seems to be different. You pick a pantone swatch and it is saved in the format of the file (RGB, CMYK, LAB, etc...) If you are using spot channels, the actual channel is a grayscale and (I think) PS uses an RGB formula of the Pantone color to draw the screen. My understanding is (and someone chime in if I'm wrong), PS never uses Pantone colors. It uses an RGB, CMYK LAB or HSB formula to 'represent' the Pantone color.

Any thoughts?

mike

If you have a home printer then dont convert the colour space to cymk keep it at rgb.

If you are using a regular old home inkjet printer, in 99% of those printers, they do not use the CMYK color space you use from graphic programs like Photoshop. They actually only recieve RGB values and then convert over to their own version of CMYK built into them. So making a graphic in CMYK and printing it out on an inkjet is pointless. Your printer only uses the values it sees on screen, which is total RGB. You're better off doing all inkjet-bound graphics in the RGB color space and hoping for the best with a bunch of trial print runs.

If you can get the pantone printed sample stock (go to a pre-press store), look for your pantone and you will se that it tells you what percentage of each cmyk colors it has,you can then make this color in PS, but when printing it might not look as it should, remember that home inkjets ink have diferent pigments than the ink of press, therefore you would have to make a color sample of diferent variants until you get a more accurate result. (make small squares with diferent % of CMYK on a page and print it to compare with the printed sample pantone)