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 Quick Selection in Photoshop

Sometimes, (okay, most of the time) when working in Photoshop, you have the need to select stuff. There are myriad ways to do so: multiple tools, different techniques, and also varied results. Some selections are better than others and some techniques work better in specific situations. Here we are only going to cover one quick and painless way to select all the stuff on one layer.

First of all, for this selection to work, an image needs to have a layer with a transparent background. The image below (from the Samples folder in Photoshop) has 8 layers, 7 of which have stuff on them with transparent backgrounds. 

Let's say you wanted to select all the nontransparent stuff on a specific layer, the "ColorfulFish" layer for example. That's the layer with the big yellow fish on it (The layer is highlighted in the image below. You don't have to have the layer you want to do your selection on highlighted, I just did that to show which layer my cursor is going to be on.) When your mouse cursor hovers over the layer thumbnail, it turns into a hand. The big black arrow in the image below is pointing to the cursor (now a hand) hovering over the thumbnail.

When the cursor is hovering over the layer thumbnail, hold down the command key (the key with the apple on it for the Mac folks). Then a selection square appears on your cursor hand, just like in the image below.

Now with the command key held down, click the mouse. And ta-da! You have now selected everything on that layer that isn't transparent. The cursor just has to be over the layer thumbnail, it doesn't matter where on the thumbnail you command-click.

Okay the image above with the three black arrows is showing which fish were magically selected with just one click, but it's pretty hard to see at that small size. Here is a close-up. Only the three fish that were on the "ColorfulFish" layer were selected.

And that's it. Easy, right? 

You know what to do from there. You can modify your selection edges, apply an adjustment to just that part of your image, or whatever you want. Just remember that for this trick to work, you have to command-click on a layer with a transparent background. It won't work on a white or solid colored background. 

Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill

One of my favorite new capabilities in Photoshop CS5 is the Content Aware Fill. When I saw the pre-release demonstration of this tool, at first my jaw dropped in admiration, then I cheered. And then I calculated the soonest I could possibly get my grubby little hands on the new Photoshop. Gone are the days of tediously using the stamp tool to clone away unwanted and distracting objects in photos!

When you use the content aware fill, Photoshop is going to analyze your image and create a background fill of what it thinks the image would look like if that unwanted object was never there.

Here's my original image. Just an old snapshot.

Not bad, but what if the big pole on the right could go away? And the oil spots on the concrete, and also the street lights in the background? I think it would look better. (Did you even notice the oil spots until I mentioned them?)

So here we go. (in Photoshop CS5) The first step is to never work on your original photo. Either save a copy as a new file, or work on a new layer (Control/Command + J for layer duplication!)

Once you have your working photo, use a lasso tool, or your favorite selection tool to loosely select the object you want to have removed. Don't make the selection right on the edge of your object! In the example below, I used the polygonal lasso tool because my selection shape was going to be roughly rectangular.

Then, if you are working on your Background layer, you can just hit delete and a Fill menu comes up. But if you are working on any other layer in your image, you need to go to Edit < Fill. A menu comes up.

I really prefer using the keyboard shortcut for going there. It is Shift + F5.
So here is the Fill menu.

If your drop down menu doesn't say "Content Aware" (like the one above), switch it, so it looks like the image below.

Once you have this selected, click ok.

The computer will chew on this for a little bit. My selection isn't large, so it only took a couple of seconds. The larger the area selected, the longer this processing time takes. Let's see what it did…

I left the selection on, so you could see the area. It's not perfect. So you can either touch it up by hand, or you could reselect the areas that need improving, and then run the Content Aware Fill again, just like we did the first time. Here's my touched up version:

You'd never have known it was there. Hurray! Okay, so what about the oil spots? Same thing. Loosely select the areas you want gone, bring up the fill menu (remember it's Shift F5, or hit delete if you are on the Background layer) and the magical Content Aware Tool will fill it in.

And the pesky lamp posts in the background? Gone.

Even the one by the guy's head can be mostly taken out with Content Aware Fill.

Just to show the whole truth, here's what Photoshop will do if you select something too complicated:

Oops! With practice, you'll learn what will fill well, and what will end up looking like this.

Okay, after all of that touch up, here's what our final image looks like:

Your eye is no longer drawn away from the people in the image to look over at the pole. And even though the oil spots weren't terribly distracting, you have to agree the image looks better without them.

The Content Aware Fill can also be used in smallish places with the Spot Healing Brush tool. First, select that tool in Photoshop, second go to the top bar that shows that tool's options, and select the Content Aware radial button:

Then you can "paint" with that tool, and the fill will be healed using the new Content Aware capabilities.

Fun, right? Quite useful, too. With this new feature in CS5 Photoshop, you can quickly touch up photos, eliminating much of the need for tedious manual cloning in. I wouldn't want to do touch ups with out it now.

Color Spaces Part 2

This is a continuation of the topic of Color Spaces started in the previous post.

Photoshop Gamut Warnings, continued

(These recommendations are for images intending to print in CMYK.)

Along with your monitor and your printer, a photo has its own color space. It may fall completely inside both the RGB and CMYK color spaces, or it may be mostly within both spaces with only a few areas out of the CMYK gamut (like the sample photo below, also used in the previous post), or it may have large areas unavailable to a CMYK gamut.  To refresh your memory, here is our sample photo with gamut warnings turned on in Photoshop.

If your photo is like ours, with very few areas of gamut warnings, it will probably look just fine in CMYK when it is converted from RGB to CMYK for print. You may want to tweak it a little, but it should look fine. Below is a comparison of our original sample image in RGB, the image with gamut warnings turned on in Photoshop, and the what the image looks like converted to CMYK. Not a lot of difference.

However, if your image has large areas covered in Photoshop's gamut warnings, you should make adjustments before you submit your image to print, otherwise you could be disappointed in the difference and you won't be in control of the effects of color conversion.

Most of the time the problem and its solution lie in the over-saturation of colors. So create an adjustment layer for Saturation in your image.

Then choose the channel in which the most warnings show (if it's in a grassy field, choose the green channel, if it's someone's red sweater, choose red, etc.)

Adjust the saturation down, until many or most or all of the gamut warnings disappear.

Another option is to create a Levels adjustment layer, and use that instead to adjust colors to remove some of the gamut warnings.

Minimizing these gamut warning areas now will minimize color shifts when your image is converted to a CMYK, or print, color space.

Before converting your image to CMYK, know what your Conversion Options are set to in your Color Settings menu. (Control + Shift + k to open the Color Settings menu in Photoshop)

Overall, we recommend that the "Intent" be set to "Relative Colormetric." For a detailed explanation of what these four rendering intents do, please visit this informative tutorial here.

This tutorial does a good job explaining the difference between Photoshop's four rendering intents: Perceptual, Saturation, Relative Colormetric, and Absolute Colormetric. And it will help you know when it's a good idea to use one of the other options besides Relative Colormetric.

(It's also a good idea to know what your other settings in the Color Settings menu are set to, as well, but we aren't covering that, right now.)

Now your conversion of an image from one color space to another will be less surprising, whether you convert your image in Photoshop, or you let your print provider do the conversion from RGB to CMYK in their workflow.

Why All This Matters to You

This is really all about control. If you know what is happening to your image's color space as you move from RGB to CMYK, you can better control how it looks. And you don't leave that control in the hands of others.

As you design your print projects, keep in mind the differences between the RGB and CMYK color spaces, or gamuts. Because they are different, what you see on your monitor will not necessarily represent what you see on paper, and what you print out on your inkjet or color laser printer does not necessarily represent what you will get from your print provider.

In fact, without any controls in place, it is a sure thing that they won't be the same.

Remember that each device has it's own color gamut. Each monitor, printer, and press will display or print your image slightly differently from your monitor, your printer, and your print provider's press.

This is one reason why the proofs that a print provider give to you are so important. The color proofs from your print provider should show what you can expect your images to look like when printed. Here at Lorraine Press we've put a lot of effort into making our color proofs an accurate reflection of what you will see on our presses at the press check.

Also, when working in cross-media marketing campaigns, knowing about color spaces and how they basically work can help as you choose colors that can look good for your projects in any medium — especially if you are using web and print in your campaigns.

Hopefully, if there are any readers still out there reading what has to be one of the longest blog posts I've ever written, this has helped introduce what color gamuts are and how they affect your projects.

Color Spaces Part 1

We are going to start off today's post with a thought exercise.

Imagine all the different visible colors, the millions upon millions of all different shades and hues. Now, picture them as a three-dimensional sphere, with white on the top most point, moving to pastels and light colors until the "equator" which has the most saturated pure colors, and then shading towards black at the bottom most point. If you start spinning your sphere, like a globe, on its White/Black axis, you would see the colors of the rainbow along the equator morph from red to orange to yellow, to green, cyan, blue purple, magenta, back to red, etc. as it turns.

Okay, you can stop spinning around. Got your sphere in your mind? We are going to pretend that this is an accurate 3D model of all the visible colors.

In reality, the 3D image of all visible color is not nearly as perfect or even very spherical, but reality is usually messy and this is just a thought exercise!

Now, inside of your sphere of all the visible colors of the world is another sphere, a smaller subset of colors. This is what we see on our computer monitors and televisions. This is the RGB color set. It can't re-create all the colors we can see with our eyes, but there are still millions of colors it can produce.

Inside that sphere is another smaller sphere. This one represents all of the colors that can be printed in ink, on paper. In our perfect imaginings, this sphere is smaller, and it will represent an average CMYK color space, for example all the colors that our printing presses here at Lorraine Press can reproduce with the normal four colors of ink.

This is a very simplified way of thinking about color spaces. But it's also a helpful way of imagining what is happening to your image during the printing process without getting into the nitty gritty and usually complicated details of color spaces. Each of step of capturing and then printing an image uses a different color space: seeing something colorful, taking a picture of it with your digital camera, looking at it on your monitor, and printing it out on your printer.

If you are interested in what a CMYK color gamut looks like in reality (the smallest sphere you imagined), click here to go to a blog post by Gordon Pritchard. The post is talking about spot colors, but the 3D image of a CMYK gamut is a good one.

Now, imperfect, messy reality demands that each monitor, digital camera, and printing device has its own unique color subset, or sphere, its own subset of possible colors it's able to reproduce. Some are RGB and some CMYK. And also in reality CMYK color spaces can even intrude outside parts of the RGB color space in certain colors.

Each imagined sphere, or color space, also called a color gamut, represents the complete subset of colors that can be accurately reproduced in that color space. It is a measured fact that the visible color gamut is much larger than the RGB gamut which is in general larger than the CMYK gamut. And this is a reality we all must live with, and it can get messy.

Here is another (two dimensional) way to look at it: (graph courtesy of Wikipedia)

The gray area represents the entire visible spectrum. And the colored triangle is what an average monitor can show. (Even though each monitor is slightly different, the technologies we use can only display a small portion of visible colors.) It may seem limiting, but your eyes are usually happy with what they see.

It gets a little more complicated when you add in the CMYK color space, but here is another graph which adds the typical CMYK color space with the typical RGB values inside of the visible spectrum: (graph courtesy of BU, who pulled it from Jackson, Richard, MacDonald, Lindsay and Freeman, Ken, Computer Generated Color, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, West Sussex, England 1994, page 221)

The CMYK area is the pentagram looking shape represented by the dotted line. Note the areas of green (at the top of the RGB triangle on the graph) and blue (the bottom left corner of the RGB triangle) that the CMYK color space cuts through. These areas involve colors that you can readily see on your monitor, but are impossible to reproduce in regular CMYK printing.

These colors are called out of gamut for the CMYK color space. There is no way to make the CMYK gamut print those colors. Therefore, when viewing a photograph on your computer screen, you should keep in mind that it is possible that there are places in your photo that CMYK won't be able to reproduce. Adobe Photoshop has a tool that can show where these places are in an image.


In Photoshop, on a Mac or PC, have your image open, then click on View, then go down to Gamut Warning. Or if you like keyboard shortcuts, hold down command and shift and the "Y" key to toggle the Warning off and on. Here is a regular RGB image, opened up in Photoshop:

If we then turn on Gamut Warning in Photoshop, grayed out areas will appear and usually look speckled:

Note the grey speckles within the black circles. These are areas that are out of gamut. This is just a warning. And it doesn't change anything in your image. It just turns on and off. Now you are probably wondering what to do about the warnings. We'll talk about that in Color Spaces - Part 2.


In the next blog post, Color Spaces Part 2, since this one is already way too long, (kudos to anyone who made it this far!) I'll explain more about color gamuts, color conversions, and why knowing about color gamuts is important to those wanting to print in color.

Two Book Recommendations

When I was out shopping recently, I was reminded that January is the month where everybody everywhere is selling the idea of self-help or self-improvement. So I thought I'd join in and recommend some self-help books for Photoshoppers.

(And to add a disclaimer, these recommendations are solely my personal opinion, and not necessarily the recommendations of Lorraine Press as a company! But to give my opinion some clout, I have read many Photoshop books.)

Out of the host of how-to books out there on Adobe Photoshop, there are two that I'd recommend to anyone who already owns the software and is comfortable using it and wants to learn more.

For those who own Photoshop CS5 (either on a PC or Mac), I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: A professional image editor's guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC by Martin Evening. It has 768 pages (in the paperback edition) of helpful advice, plus an accompanying DVD that shows how your new skills can be applied. Haven't upgraded to CS5? Don't worry there's help for you procrastinators: the same book except written for CS4 is available, too. This book is most helpful to people who already are used to the basics in Photoshop and are ready for nitty gritty details.

For those who own Photoshop Elements, don't despair! There's a self-improvement book I am recommending for you, too. I particularly enjoyed Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Elements 9 Book for Digital Photographers (also by Matt Kloskowski). The 456 page book is full of "how-to" tips and effective techniques for getting the results you want. Plus, he tells how to work around several features that are in CS5 but not in Elements 9. I believe he calls them "cheats." It's a practical, "here's how you do this effect" book.

Either one of these books can improve a person's Photoshop skills. And after simply reading through these books, I guarantee you will have learned at least one new trick that will stick with you for years. So, in one area at least, your self-improvement goals can be met early in the year with small physical effort and a tiny outlay of cash!

Happy Reading!