Monday, March 7, 2011

PMS to CMYK Press Sheet

Years ago, while working at a sheetfed litho shop, I was bored one day and looking for something to fill my time. The prepress supervisor asked me to make a press sheet with all the PMS color chips, plus all of their corresponding CMYK values right underneath the color chips. He seemed puzzled at how excited I was to take on the task. Preparing this file was fun! We used that press sheet for a couple of years (until, sadly, the printing company went out of business). This color chart was particularly helpful in helping us color-match on our large format solvent roll printer and UV flatbed printer.

I saved the file and stumbled across it recently. Click here for a downloadable PDF. It is a 38" x 25" press sheet, complete with gripper. Enjoy!

6 comments :

  1. Very cool! Thanx! Can you explain how you made it? What was your 'modus operandi'? It seems a time-consuming, room for error, kind a task. :-)

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  2. I used Illustrator and did it all manually... and very carefully. I think I started with one rectangle and a type object below it, then step and repeated it until it filled the whole page. Then I went in one-by-one, filling in each rectangle with a different color, then typing the color number into the text, and then used the color panel to obtain the CMYK values, which I then typed in manually.

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  3. awsome dude, just what i need. In illustrator is there any way to select all the colours and convert them all to cmyk.? instead of individually.? Many Thanks

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  4. Select all: Edit > Edit colors > Convert to CMYK

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  5. I just found this and LOVE IT!!!! Thank you very much!!!

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