I'm not trying to dissuade you from this, but the easier and more accurate route may be to just have them do a visual match at the printer. Unless your color workflow and theirs are extremely accurately matched to the pantone model, there's no way the outputs will really match. I'd have them print whatever you have on the laser, adjust it until it's a good color match to what you want, then pick a pantone color that matches the laser output.
Again, I'm not saying color correction isn't useful, but in this case I think there's a much simpler (and more accurate) way to go about it if you don't have an established workflow. Color matching to one color (if it's a relative match) should be simple enough in this manner. If you were doing a full-color layout, I'd definitely provide accurate cmyk output, but I don't see why you'd want to bust your brain over it in this case :)
Just my thoughts.
JF
On 01/07/2010 06:03 AM, JiHO wrote:
Thanks for the reply.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 18:48, Joshua Facemyer<jfacemyer@...400...> wrote:
This shouldn't pose any problem at all. They shouldn't need cmyk, if it's monochrome. You should be able to provide any image format of high enough quality. They'll only be using one plate, so you can specify a specific pantone color for it.
Or am I missing something???
You're not, I was. Until yesterday, I assumed that we would print on a regular laser printer because the number of copies was low (hence the need for CMYK). But yesterday evening, after a discussion with the print shop, we realized that, since the work was monochrome, it was actually cheaper to use offset printing even for a low number of copies. So indeed I am now converting most of the work to black tones and we'll use a pantone 426U as the ink.
BUT... (there's always a but) some related work will still be done on a laser printer. So I still need CMYK for this. And I need CMYK values that *match* the Pantone 426U brown we chose. I found the CMYK equivalent through photoshop: C50 M56 J60 K26. However, when I try to input those values in the CMYK color picker of Inkscape, they don't stick and they are converted to other numbers. I guess the corresponding color cannot be expressed in RGB. I am not sure. I tried creating a jpeg filled with this color in Photoshop, with the sRGB profile, then importing it into Inkscape and getting the color with the color picker. It gives me C0 M16 Y25 K56. It looks approximately similar to photoshop in the non-color managed view but looks very different in the color managed one, even though I use the same profile when proofing in both software (Coated FOGRA27, which Photoshop suggestion for general work in Europe). Does someone have a suggestion on how to input the correct CMYK values? What other solutions are out there?
Thanks in advance.
JiHO