(v13) Named color editing background

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP

When a job containing a spot color is printed on a CMYK device or to CMYK or CMYKOG (for example) including spots as well as process separations for something like an offset press the appropriate equivalent CMYK values are obtained from either:

• the alternate space in the spot color definition in the PostScript language or PDF
• a NamedColor lookup table.

For commonly used colors the NamedColor route is preferred, because many tables are provided for a lot of Pantone colors in XYZ, meaning that they can be transformed through the output profile for the device/media resulting in a better match to the “real” Pantone inks than a CMYK value calculated for some (more or less) random printing condition.

There are, however, certain instances where perhaps the match from the RIP is not quite as good as it might be on some media or you don’t actually want an accurate match for other design reasons. To facilitate this the Brand color editing API is added to the RIP to allow modification (or to override), the spot color lookup tables to achieve a more desirable result.