Tinted pantones

Printing and Prepress
#1

Does anyone have tricks to matching tinted pantone values? A customer has a logo that includes a pantone both at 100% and at 60%. We have pantone books in house, but certainly not with tinted values included for every swatch. I have tried changing it to CMYK in the file and then using Recolor Artwork to match to the closest, but was hopeful there might be a more accurate way.

#2

It’s too bad that Pantone stopped selling their tint swatch deck. All the colors from 10% to 100% by tens.
http://www.colorguides.net/gp1205.html

#3

Beyond that, the only thing I can suggest is to print the tints of the number out by 5s and let the client pick.
Tints are rather subjective anyway.

#4

You’re trying to find the four color equivalent to a 60% tint of a PMS color?

I’d start by converting the PMS color to a four color tint (with the substantial caveat that not all PMS color convert nicely to CMYK) and then make a 60% tint of the converted color.

If you’re looking for the makeup of the resulting color, that’s pretty simple math. Let’s say the CMYK equivalent is 100% c, 80% m, 60% y, 40% k, that works out to be 60% c, 48% m, 36% y, 24% k.

EDIT: I’d suggest making a test print to verify your tint.

#5

Maybe we should start by asking how this is being printed.
For instance, if I know the color will hit on profile on a wide format machine, telling the machine to do 60% of that color is usually a safe bet. It’s when you get down into the 10-20% range where things get a bit dicey as inks drop to near zero. I’ve had blues turn pink at low percentages…

Even a digital press, depending on the inkset might be no worries.

If this is conventional 4-color process though…

#6

Thanks for the input guys.

Yes, this will be for 4-color process. To complicate everything, I am only setting up the artwork - our printer is at another location, so they will match to a pantone book there. Thankfully since the logo uses the un-tinted (thats not a word) version they will have some reference, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something and that this was as tricky as it seemed.

Thank you!