Pantone Colours: How They Behave

The Pantone system is primarily a colour matching system for lithographic printers, printing onto white paper. For printing systems and substrates outside of this the Pantone standard should be regarded as a guide only.

In the business gift industry products are normally personalised using screen process printing or tampo (pad) printing using non lithographic inks, usually onto materials other than white paper. How then, can you determine how accurate a requested colour match will be on a coloured substrate?

Put simply, there is no absolutely perfect method available to give you a definitive answer. However, you can get a pretty good idea if you remember the following.

The best pantone book to use is the 'Colour Formula Guide'. This shows you the mixing ratios that lithographic printers use to make their colour matches. Although, screen and tampo printers do not use these guides for mixing inks as their base mixing colours are different, the formulae themselves are very revealing.

With the exception of Grey, metallic and fluorescent colours, the formulae guide works on central colours. That is, each page in the formulae guide has a central colour and you can determine which colour on the page that is because the formula listed for that colour does not contain black or white. This central colour is the starting-off point for colour matchers and the other colours on each page use this basic mix to create all the other colours on that page, by simply adding either black or white to it. Usually increasing amounts of white going up the page and increasing amounts of black down the page. As black and white are the only two pigments that a colour matcher can use to increase the opacity of an ink, and as we said earlier, these central colours contain no black or white, then it follows that the most translucent colour on each page is the central colour. This is the colour on each page that will give the worst colour when you are printing onto a non-white substrate. The colours furthest away from the central colour on each page will usually provide the best colour match because the opaque pigments, white and black, will help obliterate the colour of the substrate beneath.

There are many other considerations regarding colour matches, but if you remember the information above it should guide us away from trying to achieve impossible matches on a coloured substrate.