How to Convert CMYK Values to the Closest Pantone Color

Here's a handy tip for finding the closest Pantone color for any color with a CMYK breakdown; well, other than hunching over your color sample with a Pantone color book, flipping through the possibilities. Or perhaps you don't have a physical sample, you only have a color on your monitor. Did you try holding the color book up to the monitor and guessing? Oh, you don't have a color book? Don't fret, once you discover what the CMYK breakdown of your mystery color is, the rest is easy! No color book necessary!

(This way is not the only way, but it's easy and, as an added bonus, free, if you already have Photoshop.)

So, first, launch Photoshop. And you have now completed the longest, most time consuming, step in this process. From here on out, it's quick! You don't even need to have a picture open. 

Move your mouse over to the foreground color swatch at the bottom of the tool panel which is usually along the far right of your screen.

Click on the foreground swatch, and the Color Picker will come up:

Type in your CMYK values in the appropriate C, M, Y, and K boxes in the Color Picker for the color in which you are interested in finding a Pantone match. In this case, this morning, it was a medium blue for which I wanted to find a close Pantone match. See the image below.

Then click on the Color Libraries button, highlighted in the image below.

A Color Libraries palette then comes up. See the image below. My Color Libraries palette was already set to the color book PANTONE Solid Coated, and it automatically selected (with a thin black box around the color) PANTONE 2915 C as the closest match in that color book. Voila, there's my answer. 

It's not perfect, but it's as close as it can get for that CMYK breakdown. (Note the color difference between the top and bottom swatches in the color sample box to see how far different the two colors are.) If your color book wasn't already set to  PANTONE solid coated, continue reading!

To select a different color book, or to set your menu to PANTONE solid coated, go to the drop down menu at the top of the Color Libraries box.

Click to select whatever color collection you are interested in having a closest match to your CMYK color. As you can see in the image below, there are myriad choices!

And that is it. Now you have the power to convert CMYK values to their closest matching Pantone colors quickly and easily, wowing your co-workers and clients!

A Tour of the Post Office

Last week, courtesy of the Printing Industries of Utah, a group of designers and printers were able to tour behind the scenes at the Post Office Sorting Center in Salt Lake City. Several of us from Lorraine Press went along to see what exactly goes on behind the scenes.

We were taken through the process a letter experiences between a mailbox and its final destination. Our tour started off in the delivery bay where mail carriers bring back the mail they have collected during their routes. Then the fun started.

A letter is first individually examined by a sorting machine. No matter how the letter went into the machine (upside down, backwards, etc.), a sensor can find the stamp and then tumble the letter through the machine to correctly place the address in front of the OCR software, so the OCR software can read the address. As if that wasn't cool enough, the OCR software can correctly identify the addressee (compared to a database of all mailing addresses in the United States) within 3 seconds over 90% of the time.

Then letters are sorted into categories. If the letter stays in Utah, it goes to one machine that then sorts it to the Utah Post Office that it belongs to. If the letter is to leave Utah, it goes to a different sorting machine. If the letter goes to some one on the Move/Forwarding database, it goes to a different area. The whole system of sorters and holding areas and organization of mail was astounding. There were even little trains overhead carrying bins of mail to the correct place, and fun twirly slides for the bins to slide down to the correct machine. The entire operation is a miracle in organization and computerization.

All mail is eventually moved from that first incoming bay, to the other side of the building where trucks are waiting to deliver mail to its destination, whether that be a local post office branch or the airport. By that time, it is organized not only by mail carrier route, but also in the order of the houses/addresses within that route.

The tour was entertaining, but also educational. The reasons behind the regulations on addressing mail, especially when dealing with mass mailings became clear when one could actually see the machines that were "reading" the addresses. We saw letters of all sizes being sorted, as well as larger flats. The new regulations of the locations of the address on magazines and large envelopes allow the machine locate the address and then sort it. The Post Office saves large amounts of money when the machines are able to handle the mail.

Overall it was a great tour, and we learned a lot. Thank you to the USPS employees who took time out of their day to show us around!