Pantone colors?

[Gutshot 6]

Hi, made a logo in Affinity. I provided the colors with the logo. HEX, RGB & CMYK. 

Now they ask the PANTONE color scheme. How to see that to pick the correct color?

Thanks in advance.

[Fixx 651]

You can access Pantone colours from Swatches selection list. Picking correct colour is best done with Pantone Colour printed guide. There are also available guides that show nearest matching Pantone – CMYK colours.

Or you can try https://www.pantone.com/color-finder#/convert

[Thomahawk 29]

And how can I add a Pantone color to the global colors list? And make it overprinting?

[Lagarto 187]

Affinity way of creating a meaningful swatch for a PMS based color is not really an example of good and intuitive UI.

Pantone colors by default are added as global spot colors in an automatically created document palette (like "Global Color 58" below, showing a triangle in the bottom left corner to indicate a global color and a white circle in the bottom right corner to indicate as spot color). You could right click the swatch in the generated list and and then choose "Overprint" from the context menu to have that color overprinted.

For me, the preferred method would be creating a document palette beforehand, then assigning the desired PMS color for an object (as in the screenshot below assigning a PMS based  yellow for a rectangle) using one of the PANTONE color palettes. Having the object with appropriate color selected, click on the leftmost icon in the Swatches palette (the first icon on the right ot the "Document" ilst box below). This creates a swatch where you have a meaningful name for the swatch, as follows (note that the swatch is not yet global, as indicated by not having the bottom left triangle in the swatch).

Subsequently you'd click the created local swatch ("PANTONE 803C" below) and choose "Make Global" from the context menu:

After that, you can select the global PMS swatch, right click it, and choose "Overprint" from the context menu, as follows:

When overpint is specifed, the swatch will have a gray circle at the top right corner:

The same method allows you to create a document palette that shows the true color values and models for each color you are going to use in your project. As there is no intrinsic method for updating the swatch names based on color values, you'd need to manually rename any swatch if you'd subsequently change any color definition of a swatch.

[thomaso 397]

Lagarto, do I understand right that you want to define a PANTONE color swatch with your custom values (e.g. a yellow you created yourself first)? If yes, I think that must not work, to avoid 'individual', customized Pantone colors which have no corresponding ink. PANTONE are limited sets of fixed inks and that way quite different to a more flexible color model like HSL, RGB or CMYK where you may define any color within the model.

[Lagarto 187]

No, the method described above is just a way to have meaningful names in the document palette. Affinity by default adds PMS color definitions in the (automatically created) document palette with nonsense "Global" labels. This is ok if you do not mind having the actual real PMS definitions be "hidden" by such generic names, so I am just showing a method of adding meaningful names first as local swatches and then converitng them to global, to achieve the same behavior.

UPDATE: You could of course equally well just rename the generic "Global" color swatch created by Affinity app and use the PMS color name, instead.

[thomaso 397]

Ah, the naming issue. Yes, the auto names of swatches, not only Pantone, is not helpful in Affinity.

Especially with Pantone it appears unnecessary weird since the real PANTONE name is shown as spot color name in the Colours panel and also named correctly as printing channel/ink.

  >> 

I assume this auto-naming is a 'leftover' from ADesigner, where colors are expected to get custom named related to graphic objects ("sunny yellow" ;•)
Whereas in APub color definitions could be more useful as names.

[Lagarto 187]

On 1/18/2020 at 5:32 AM, thomaso said:

I assume this auto-naming is a 'leftover' from ADesigner, where colors are expected to get custom named related to graphic objects ("sunny yellow" ;•)
Whereas in APub color definitions could be more useful as names

Generic global default names are basically just fine, as you are likely to give them more descriptive names anyway, and especially if you are going to change the color definition of the swatch later, and initially just want to have a global logical color to be assigned to specific objects in your project. It is just that often a true color definition is the most useful description for a swatch, even if you'd subsequenty change it (e.g. in InDesign color value is the default label of a new swatch). The problem with Affinity apps is that there is no method to (semiautomatically) update the swatch name with the current color definition (as there is in e.g. InDesign), and that there is no an easy way to show the true value for a swatch using a generic descriptive label, similarly as there is in e.g. InDesign:

Instead, you'd need to activate the Color panel (as in your screenshot above) to show the true color definition, or use the Color picker tool.

As for the question of the original post, I think there is currently no way to try to match an RGB or CMYK based color definition with a PMS definition (similarly as there is e.g. in Photoshop, or apps like CorelDRAW), so the online tool provided by PANTONE, as advised by @Fixx above, is probably the best way to try to determine a matching PMS library color.