Specifications

11.6 Spot colors

Spot colors defined

Spot colors are colors which are printed with their own premixed inks. You can choose from several

spot color systems and from hundreds of different spot-color inks. In spot-color offset printing,

each spot color is reproduced using a single printing plate. In contrast, process color printing uses

four inks only (CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to reproduce all colors.

If you print a spot color at 100%, a solid opaque color appears on your page (not a dot pattern). A

tint of a spot color, i.e. a lightened spot color, is created by printing smaller halftone dots of the

base color.

Spot colors can provide excellent results when used for offset printing. For digital output or monitor

display, however, spot colors are less well-suited and should be used with caution.

Unambiguously defined spot colors

Unambiguously defined spot colors are colors which have distinct names and associated CMYK

equivalents. If two spot colors with different CMYK values have the same name, they will be

considered ambiguously defined.

An example would be a document which contains objects from various applications:

• Green lines which were drawn in a word processing application.

• The company logo which was created using illustration software.

If the spot colors of these objects have the same name, say “company green”, but different CMYK

values, they are ambiguously defined.

A - Company logo: “company green” C 100%, M 0%, Y 100%, K 50%

B - Separator lines: “company green” C 90%, M 0%, Y 90%, K 50%

Converting spot colors to the equivalent CMYK process colors

Sometimes, it may be convenient to use spot colors in your source document and have Enfocus

PitStop Server convert these spot colors to the corresponding RGB or CMYK colors in the PDF

Enfocus PitStop Server