Frustrations with spot colors

[KirkMcPike]

I am new to Affinty's software. I'm trying to move to them from Adobe's far more expensive products. Overall, I love the apps. Very usable and modern. However, I have had repeated problems with spot colors. For the life of me I can't figure out how to add spot colors to my swatches palettes as spot colors and then apply them to objects. Whenever I look up a Pantone color and add it to the swatches palette it gets added as CMYK. I have tried following advice in threads on here and on Affinity's help system to add spot colors, but then I end up on a screen where I can't search for the exact Pantone color I need. 

The whole thing baffles me. If I'm looking up a Pantone color and then adding that as a swatch it should always be added as a spot color by default. That's just basic user expectation. I get that there should be a function to convert that spot color to CMYK, RGB, etc, but if I'm picking a spot color, why isn't it coming through as a spot color?

Is there anywhere I can look online with simple instructions on how to do the following in Affinity Designer: select a specific spot color (let's say Pantone 288 C), and create a swatch of it solely as a spot color?

Thank you all in advance for help!

[Dazmondo77]

Yes it's super over complicated - If only we had global and spot colours as the default option, and maybe have a tick box option to enable the horrible way? - anyway you need to create a document palette for globals or spots : - 

[lacerto]

(...)

[KirkMcPike]

Thank you both! I think I have it figured out. I've saved my Pantone colors and their CMYK equivalents as swatches on an Application Palette, which seems to be available to any document I open or create. I appreciate the quick and clarifying feedback!

[lacerto]

(...)

[KirkMcPike]

I guess I don't understand the value of a "Global" spot color. When I saved them to a "Document" palette, I couldn't find them when opening a new document. I just want to be able to quickly pull up my proper spot colors whenever working on something involving a political campaign logo. Is there an advantage to a "Global" swatch as opposed to swatches in an Application palette?

[user_0815]

"Global" does not mean globally available in the app and all documents. That would be the Application Palette.

Application palette = always available in the app (any document you open) 
Document palette = Available only in that one document where the palette lives
Global colour = If you change that global colour, every element which uses that global colour gets updated with that change. Afaik this is on a per-document level.

[KirkMcPike]

Ah, got it. Then "Application Palette" is definitely what I want. Thank you!

[lacerto]

(...)

[Kal]

On 2/4/2021 at 6:10 AM, Lagarto said:

This is the way I do this …

🏆

@Lagarto, your comment should be pinned to the top of the forums permanently and turned into an official tutorial. Or better still, Affinity devs could fix this whole mess!

[Kal]

On 2/4/2021 at 6:10 AM, lacerto said:

(...)

Oh no, the most useful tip on the forums got replaced with '(...)'. I've seen this elsewhere. What happened here…?

[Ideagonal]

2 hours ago, Kal said:

Oh no, the most useful tip on the forums got replaced with '(...)'. I've seen this elsewhere. What happened here…?

Indeed

[lacerto]

Here is an up-to-date recording:

I would have created this with v2, but noticed that renaming spot print color was broken (at least in this instance).

A couple of things that are worth a note:

1) It is useful to first create dummy swatches (rectangles) and then select them one by one and have spot colors assigned to them. After that, it is easy to create meaningfully named swatches in the document palette.

2) Most of the PANTONE palettes are process palettes, not spot color palettes so sometimes not having assumed spot color showing in PDF output is simply because process color swatches have been used instead of spot color libraries. The Color panel shows whether a color is truly a spot color or not. A spot color is also indicated in the swatch with a circle on the lower right corner (while a global swatch is indicated by a triangle on the lower left corner of the swatch).

3) It is a good idea to make the spot swatches global because that allows making tints based on spot swatches, and also having a separate global name (that could basically be anything) and a spot name, which is the plate name ("ink") that appears in the exported PDF.

4) When creating custom spot colors, any color definition model can be used to define the representation of the color (though the actual display is limited in Affinity apps; e.g., even if you use a Lab color definition, the color will be shown in full gamut only if the document color space allows that). Often the printshop might ask you to use a specific plate name, so here it is also useful to create a global color so that you can have separate descriptive and more informative name in the UI, and the required printer requested name to be shown in the exported PDFs.

5) It is good to note that Affinity apps might require assigning of a swatch color multiple times before it "takes" (it is sometimes "just" a screen refresh problem, but sometimes if you cannot see the spot color plate appearing in the PDF, the reason might be here). 

6) If you open a created PDF in Publisher, it shows the assigned spot colors in the Color panel. This allows to check that spot colors have been assigned as expected  without an extra tool like Adobe Acrobat Pro. Publisher however does not import overprint status of objects in a PDF so it does not replace a proper prepress tool.

7) In Affinity apps you cannot turn a process color to spot, or spot color assignment to process while keeping the assignment. You also cannot get estimation of closest spot color matching the currently selected process color.