Friday, July 15, 2011

How to Convert CMYK Values to the Closest Pantone Color

Here's a handy tip for finding the closest Pantone color for any color with a CMYK breakdown; well, other than hunching over your color sample with a Pantone color book, flipping through the possibilities. Or perhaps you don't have a physical sample, you only have a color on your monitor. Did you try holding the color book up to the monitor and guessing? Oh, you don't have a color book? Don't fret, once you discover what the CMYK breakdown of your mystery color is, the rest is easy! No color book necessary!

(This way is not the only way, but it's easy and, as an added bonus, free, if you already have Photoshop.)

So, first, launch Photoshop. And you have now completed the longest, most time consuming, step in this process. From here on out, it's quick! You don't even need to have a picture open. 

Move your mouse over to the foreground color swatch at the bottom of the tool panel which is usually along the far right of your screen.


Click on the foreground swatch, and the Color Picker will come up:


Type in your CMYK values in the appropriate C, M, Y, and K boxes in the Color Picker for the color in which you are interested in finding a Pantone match. In this case, this morning, it was a medium blue for which I wanted to find a close Pantone match. See the image below.


Then click on the Color Libraries button, highlighted in the image below.


A Color Libraries palette then comes up. See the image below. My Color Libraries palette was already set to the color book PANTONE Solid Coated, and it automatically selected (with a thin black box around the color) PANTONE 2915 C as the closest match in that color book. Voila, there's my answer. 


It's not perfect, but it's as close as it can get for that CMYK breakdown. (Note the color difference between the top and bottom swatches in the color sample box to see how far different the two colors are.) If your color book wasn't already set to  PANTONE solid coated, continue reading!

To select a different color book, or to set your menu to PANTONE solid coated, go to the drop down menu at the top of the Color Libraries box.


Click to select whatever color collection you are interested in having a closest match to your CMYK color. As you can see in the image below, there are myriad choices!


And that is it. Now you have the power to convert CMYK values to their closest matching Pantone colors quickly and easily, wowing your co-workers and clients!

5 comments:

  1. "Did you try holding the color book up to the monitor and guessing" — you lost all credibility right there. Colours on screen are backlit, RGB representations of colours. Trying to match a printed colour to a backlit, screen colour is... well you can see the problems there right???

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  2. This was a helpful tip.
    Unlike Zach, I realize that you were not advocating holding your swatch book up to the monitor. It was just an example of the many ways one might struggle to match a color.

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  3. wow its great thing and wish to you do more level of things and i am waiting to get your new ideas. keep share more things.
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