Spot colour definitionsSpot colours realise a consistent colour and are often used in logos and house style colours. The printer provides a spot colour editor and a set of pre-defined spot colour libraries, such as PANTONE libraries and HKS libraries. The library of custom spot colours contains spot colours that users have created in the Settings Editor or on the control panel.
Custom spot colour libraryIf a source document contains a spot colour definition, the printer needs to know how to print that particular colour. A spot colour is the combination of a spot colour name, the colour value and a tint value. The device-independent spot colour definition uses a CIELAB value (Lab value). When you create a spot colour for a specific media family you use a CMYK value.
You can add more CMYK colour values to a spot colour definition, for other media families that print the spot colour.
When you want to add a spot colour that has the exact colour value of a sample, for example in an offset print, you measure the spot colour with the i1Pro3 spectrophotometer. The measured Lab values define the new spot colour.
When you add or edit a spot colour definition, you can print a patch chart to check how the set CMYK values and small variations on these values appear on media. The printed colours and the CMYK values of the patches give the best visual match to fine-tune the spot colour for the given media family.
The printer provides pre-defined spot colour libraries, such as PANTONE libraries and HKS libraries.
Spot colour libraries in the Settings EditorThe Settings Editor can store three types of spot colour libraries:
Pre-defined spot colour libraries, with pre-defined spot colour definitions.
Custom spot colour libraries, with spot colour definitions that have been created on the control panel or in the Settings Editor.
Imported spot colour libraries (Named colour profiles), with spot colour definitions stored in an ICC profile.
In the Settings Editor you can import named spot colour profiles and export spot colour libraries that were imported as named spot colour libraries.
Custom spot colour libraryA named colour profile is an ICC profile that contains a list of spot colours names with colour values (Lab or XYZ). When you import a named colour profile, the named colour profile is added as an imported spot colour library. A named colour profile has a standardised file format defined by the ICC (International Color Consortium).