What if you're designing a job that's going to print on a digital press?
Can they even print spot colors? Well, you're going to find that a lot of
digital presses don't support spot colors.
They're based on CMYK toners or inks. Although some vendors do offer some
limited spot inks or toners. The Xerox iGen And HP Indigo presses are
capable of doing some spot colors, but they have a limited range of offerings.
So you should ask your printer before you get your heart set on a color.
But here's something kind of interesting, the inks and the toners that are used on
digital presses, even though they might be called cyan, magenta, yellow, and
black, use slightly different pigments, they use slightly different, extenders
and binders. And they may have a wider color gamut
than offset inks. You know, it depends on the color that
you're trying to print. An this is really good news.
Often they can come closer to matching PANTONE colors, than offset presses can.
So you should ask your printer. Rather than you losing some vibrancy by
converting to CMYK up front, see if you can't benefit by keeping your colors
specified as spot colors, and then let that device do the conversion, because
they have internal software that can. Look at the PANTONE color that you've
specified in your document, and then convert that to a value that prints
fairly closely on their press. So don't give up color, early, because
you may not have to. But of course talk to the printer, see
how close they can come, and you may find that this is actually good news.
You may actually get better rendering on a digital press, then you would on an
offset press. And I'll bet you that's sort of a surprise.