Finding a good printer isn’t at all difficult. Most good, local offset printers will gladly take on spot color work. The problem comes into play when people conditioned to cheap online gang printing expect more than they’re willing to pay.
The same problem occurs when designers run into clients who think the 5er prices they found online represent the going rate for good, quality work.
You can’t just use the book conversion when going from Spot to CMYK. A good printer will be profiled in some fashion, in the US wide format market (your mileage will vary,) the machines are callibrated to Pantone Coated (even if you are using a matte medium.) If you apply the actual Pantone number, the profiled machine conversion can be really close depending on the skill of the color tech in doing the calibrating. Quite a number of places seem to just rely on the profile downloads without checking, and that can be just as bad as not using them at all, if the machine/rip isn’t properly calibrated.
Some places will actually go so far as to print a chart and do the swaps. You pay a premium per color matched that way, but if color accuracy is extremely important to you, that low-2-figure fee shouldn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Of course that fee is often more than a whole ream of gang run business cards…
Pick your poison
If your CMYK conversions aren’t working, talk to your printer about how they would suggest getting a better color match.
It didnt seem as if our printer was using the embed profiles to download. I know he was checking the Print Production settings in acrobat.
A few months ago we were printing new material for a new brand. The RGB looked golden yellow. LQ office printer printed it more yellow. The Epson 15000x photo printed it out more golden orange. (colors werent choosen by me, but our former Creative Director who had no design exp. [former senior designer had to teach her about RGB and CMYK])
The final product ended up being printed on what appears to be 90# glossy stock and the yellow naturally was different than any test print before. (company is ran backwards so the product launched before any product was in-house or any material was designed for it so time wasn’t on our side for test prints or adjusting that yellow as the CEO loves it the way it is).
-.- anyone want to fill my shoes? lol sole designer at the company now.
Quite honestly?
You wouldn’t be able to embed ANY of the profiles my print subs use. Heck, some of them are proprietary and they don’t even let me have them after working with them for 20 years. LOL!
You have generic profiles in your software. If the printer is good, their machines are callibrated for the stock, inkset, and machine they are using and they will apply them in the pre-press process. They are very often custom, especially those shops offering cross-media matching. They take time and an experienced tech to set them up.
Ask your printer if they have Job Options for the various stuff you do. You can load those into Acrobat and create specifically profiled files that should do a lot better in your printer’s workflow.
I’ll have to do this then, Thanks
@Billyjeanplxiv, I’ve been mentioning Pantone in the context of offset. PrintDriver has been approaching it from the viewpoint of digital printing. These are two very different printing technologies that use Pantone’s matching system in very different ways.
You mentioned CMYK, so I assumed offset. If you’re using digital printing, trying to match Pantone colors in a CMYK color space makes little sense. This is because digital printing devices can typically print a wider color gamut than CMYK, which can usually better approximate a Pantone color.
If a job is printed offset, there’s just no way to approximate some Pantone colors using CMYK inks. Instead, matching a Pantone color in conjunction with CMYK requires a separate Pantone ink on a 5-color press. With digital printing, the options are more varied regarding approximation due to the larger color gamut extending somewhat beyond CMYK.
Understanding these printing technology issues is critical to selecting which printing technology (and printing company) to use and how to prepare the artwork correctly to accommodate those choices.
I don’t quite understand what you’re saying, but you seem to be implying that you’re printing small type using multiple inks. This is never a good idea due to registration issues. When you’re using an actual Pantone spot color with offset, fine — that’s just a single color. A Pantone approximation (offset or digital) will use multiple inks and should never be used to print text — especially small text.
You should see some of the 4-color text we can print, and how small it can go. But it is very media specific
Again digital with a fairly wide gamut and small picoliter count droplet size (and sometimes on grass-grows-faster print speed, LOL)
It’s also specific to printing companies. The kinds of printing that push the boundaries of what’s possible require a company with the right equipment and a reputation built upon quality, attention to detail, personalized service, and press operators who appreciate the challenge. This comes with a price to match, though. When filling out an online form and uploading a file to a low-cost online printer, it’s safe to assume the opposite will be true.
You said this though
A Pantone approximation (offset or digital) will use multiple inks and should never be used to print text — especially small text.
Never say “never.” 
Printing is all about vetting your sources.
True. I should have said, as a rule of thumb, never color small text using multiple inks unless you’re sure the printing company you’ve chosen is capable of pulling off the tight registration to ensure there will be no rainbowed edges on the printed letters.
Sometimes, it takes way too many words to explain the nuanced exceptions. Sometimes, it’s just easier (and more to the point) to say, “Don’t do that (unless you’re sure you and the people you’re working with know what they’re doing).” 
The service being used is the original ai file is exported as JPEG so the marketing director can upload the JPEGs to a service that makes business cards out of JPEGs. I think its called YouPrint (ideally not a choice of mine).
Its a dark background with small white text she added. So the dark navy (originally Pantone 2766 C) is a mere image of what it should be. In this case the Pantone is represented in the JPEG that is then printed.
There were some registration issues kinda looked like magenta dust appeared on some first round prints before the printer warmed up.
I just looked at YouPrint’s website. As usual with these places, there’s practically no technical information. I couldn’t even find information about bleeds or resolution. It might be there, but it wasn’t obvious.
The site accepts JPEG, TIFF, and PDF files, which makes me wonder why your marketing supervisor chose JPEG. I would have chosen PDF to preserve the vector data for their RIP to rasterize at its preferred resolution. She chose JPEG, which means it was rasterized at whatever resolution she specified and, even worse, was subjected to lossy compression, which isn’t a good thing to do to type.
Reversing small type out of a dark 4-color background is almost always best avoided. Not only does it invite registration issues, it risks dot gain filling in the type.
But I bet she loves them
OH, YES. lol. If she had it her way she would have designed them herself (i.e looking up a brand on google images and copying that).
Wow thanks for looking into it! I thought it seemed a little too convenient to be true, I’ll be sure to avoid them then.
So do most designers tend to just go with CMYK when printing rather than using Pantones? I find it so depressing if I want to use, say, a vibrant green in any branding… as it means it’ll just never work in print (at least not in cmyk anyway)
You can absolutely 100% use Pantones in all your work.
There are printers out there that specialise in printing Pantone colours.
You might pay a bit more - but you get what you pay for.
Pantone colours are not a direct conversion to CMYK so there will always be a colour shift.
And some colours will not be reproducable in CMYK.
It’s just something to be aware of.
You can get your jobs printed in CMYK and with 6 spot colours if you want.
there are 10 colour printing presses.
But mostly for small runs of 1-3 colour printing of pantone colours printing companies will have dedicated smaller stations to accommodate people - using possibly a GTO or similar.
Brading is a huge business. And I’ve often sent off stationery sets of pantone to be all printed in there 1000’s for big companies.
If you’re not printing 1000’s then consider working in CMYK as digital prints under a run of a 1000 are typically more cost efficient than printing them litho.
It’s highly important to discuss all options with your print vendor.
That’s why I prefer to stay with local printers and avoid online printing services.
One huge pitfall a colleague of mine made was that they sent off 10,000 compliment slips to be printed litho using Spot colours - and then he ran off the 1000 letter heads, and the 100 each of each business card on a digital printer in the office.
When the Comp slips came back - there was no way the pantone would match the digital print job he did.
he had to scrap the 1000 LHs and 100 of each of the business cards.
He contacted the litho company and they agreed to print them for free on this occasion. Which was nice of them.
Morale of the story, don’t mix your print suppliers. Send all to the same printer - or you’ll get a shitshow returned you.
I love getting feedback where a client says, “Out of all the collateral we had printed for the show, how come you were the only one to consistently hit our brand colors?”
The better part is when they remember it next time.
I had a gimp of a manager a few years ago; he split a high-profile FSDU order (and I mean a multi-billion company global company), it was 100,000s to be shipped all over the world.
He split them amongst different printers. Same PDF.
We had to get samples to show them they wanted to see about 50 lined up together.
He only got samples of 5 from each person who printed them. So he’d have 50 samples to photograph.
Well - they didn’t match in colour at all.
10 different printers - 10 different colour outcomes.
He didn’t last long.
I don’t do those quantities but you gotta put at least a delta-e on things like that.
In the stuff I do, I can, and do, usually cross 3 or 4 print vendors for large projects but they are all fully vetted for color control, quality and delivery.