When you see a color brochure, pocket folder or newsletter, you may not realize all that is involved with printing these pieces in such vivid and accurate detail. Perhaps your company has a very specific blue or green that you use in your logo, online and throughout your print. In the printing industry, we use a color matching system called Pantone Matching System, or PMS. This allows us to specify spot colors by a number or name, ensuring that they are matched pretty precisely with our ink.
When this gets tricky is when we’re printing a four-color piece, which uses “process colors” or colors that utilize a ratio of each element in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to produce all the colors used in the design. In cases where matching a certain PMS color is critical and we are printing out of four-color process, we would suggest adding a fifth color from PMS. Then your piece prints in C, M, Y, K and that specified PMS color.
To give you an example, we print a five-color newsletter for one of our clients whose company’s blue is PMS 300. It’s important within their branding standards that PMS 300 blue be properly represented in all printed pieces, so we not only print this newsletter in four color process, but we also add in PMS 300 as a fifth color to ensure that the areas printing their blue match precisely.
Have more questions about when to add a fifth color? Contact your sales rep or CSR today to ask for more information. As always, we’re here to guide you through the process!
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