Achieving the Best Corporate Colors in CMYK

Most of our customers are quite familiar with the challenges of RGB, CMYK and Pantone color. RGB, or "Red Green Blue" is the color space you see on your screens. CMYK, or "Cyan Magenta Yellow Black" refers to process color and is used for most full-color printing. Pantone, AKA spot colors, are specially-mixed inks and provide additional color options you often cannot achieve using only CMYK.

When it comes to reproducing corporate or brand colors, it's often best when critical color is required to use a Pantone spot color. Sometimes, however, you need to build the closest equivalent using CMYK. This is where it gets tricky as there may not be a single formula for the closest equivalent to a Pantone color. In fact, tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Color Bridge often convert a spot color to CMYK with different outcomes. As you combine the tools together to create a layout, your colors may then look inconsistent between headlines and graphics, for example.

Holland Litho recommends that we have a conversation when color accuracy and consistency is critical to your printed piece. We can help you choose the best formula for the conversion, i.e. what percentage of each ink color to use. Then, rather than relying on inconsistent conversions, use that formula to define your colors consistently across your suite of creative software tools.

Let's have a conversation early on if your pieces feature a critical color that you really want to pop.

For more information on color, please review our Ultimate Color Guide.

Below are some examples of Pantone swatch books that show the closest possible CMYK match to Pantone colors.