When spot colours are used as part of a digital print design, this provides added benefits to digital print operators: being able to change a colour within the design while leaving other elements alone, and without returning to the native artwork to make changes. Take the example below that has just come out of the digital printer:

I’m happy with the overall picture, but the type looks too “fire engine red”, so I ask the digital print operator to “darken the type”. Unfortunately, the artwork has been set up without any spot colours, so the software that controls the printer can only make changes to the whole print, not just the type in red. The digital print operator tweaks some options and shows me the result below:

Sure, the red type has become darker, great – but at the cost of the rest of the image getting darker. Now, if we take the same situation but had applied a spot colour to the red (and this can be a custom spot colour, it doesn’t have to be a proprietary spot colour such as from the Pantone libraries), the digital print operator can now adjust this spot colour channel without influencing any other elements on the page. I’m now shown this graphic and much happier:

Another benefit is that if the spot colour is given a name does match a spot colour definition that is already installed on the printer software, the printer will now assign its breakdown of the colour. For example, the EFI Fiery RIP has Pantone Coated libraries installed and the spot colour in the artwork is called PANTONE 485 C – so the RIP will use the colour definitions as defined on the RIP, rather than the colour breakdown provided from my native application. In addition, if the colour that prints out isn’t quite right, the digital print operator can make manual tweaks to the definition so that the colour can be adjusted.

When the spot colour isn’t known

Using another example, a customer would like us to design a “reskinned” wine label for their business, and they have provided a PDF from their stationery on-file that contains their logo. The trouble is that the artwork is RGB:

Upon reaching out to the customer, the CSR has been given the following information:

• Dark Blue: #002D59
• Yellow: #FFCC00
• Red: #E30613
• Green: #009640
• Light Blue: #A1DAF8

After holding my head in my hands for a while and contemplating my life’s choices, I inform the CSR that the values they’ve given me are Hex values that are used for on-screen colours and not the spot colour values I’m looking for. I ask the CSR to see if they can obtain a style guide from the client, but to no avail.

Try opening the PDF in Adobe Illustrator

Dov Isaacs – former Principal Scientist at Adobe who helped develop PDF has a firm opinion on opening PDFs in Illustrator. To quote Dov himself: “To be very clear, Adobe Illustrator is not, repeat is not, repeat once again is not a general purpose PDF file editor”. However, he also says “The only PDF files that can safely be edited in Adobe Illustrator (with some exceptions) are PDF files saved from Adobe Illustrator for which the Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities option was specified when the PDF file was saved from Illustrator.” Read more from his forum post here:

In this instance, I don’t want to edit the artwork in Adobe Illustrator, just determine the colours. If the artwork had been made in Illustrator and wasn’t manipulated outside of Illustrator, the swatches should still be there and look like the following.

However, the PDF supplied by the client that I’ve opened in Illustrator has been made from Adobe InDesign and forced to RGB via the ink manager and convert to profile, so instead my swatches palette in Illustrator looks like this:

Try opening the PDF in a text editor.

Looking again at the artwork, it was clear that at one stage this artwork probably existed somewhere as a spot colour file, but has only been forced to RGB on export or within Acrobat itself – the underlying metadata concerning the colour should be there.

Considering other options were to either “guess” the spot colours and hope we were right and that the client wouldn’t notice, or delay the job even further and frustrate the client and my CSR, there was nothing to lose by opening the file in a text editor to see if there was any information tucked away that wasn’t available to Acrobat.

Initially, the file looked like garbled nonsense. Despite this, I chose Find from the edit menu and typed the word Pantone in the Find field. Luckily for me, BBedit revealed 10 matches.

Upon pressing the Find All button in the Find dialog, I was then presented with only the lines found from the query I’d typed in, and ultimately I had the answer concerning the spot colours used in the artwork.

Doesn’t always work

While this solution worked in this situation, it isn’t guaranteed to work every time. This only worked in my particular situation because the original PDF had been exported from an InDesign file that had been prepared as spot colour separations. If the original artwork had been prepared using vector graphics that were still using process or RGB colours, I’d be no better off.

However, this method does leave operators with one more “last chance” options to find out a spot colour if all other methods appear to have been exhausted.