Important notes when using PANTONE colors

PANTONE colors (and CYMK colors in general) are useful for reproducing a known color. There is no other reason to use CMYK or PANTONE colors, and for all normal use we recommend using HSV or RGB colors.

If you use any of the Xara transparency effects on or over any CMYK or PANTONE color, the color will be modified by the transparency process (which mixes any transparent colors with those underneath the object) and will not produce the expected PANTONE color. This is an unavoidable consequence of the way transparency works.

So a simple rule if you require a PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE color or a specific CMYK color value (and that includes the use of pure K shades of gray) is to not use transparency, feathering, soft shadows, bevels or Live Effects on or over these objects. Doing so will result in that object or portion of the object being processed as RGB colors and so will result in color shifts.

Viewing print colors on screen

There is a huge difference between screen and printed colors. Computer monitor screens can reproduce a much wider, much brighter range of colors. Printers use CMYK inks instead of RGB colors, and so the method of reproducing color is entirely different. As an example, pure bright RGB green on screen is completely impossible to reproduce on any printer.

Technically speaking the screen color gamut is much larger than available on printers. Xara Designer Pro and Photo & Graphic Designer provide a simple way to simulate the printer colors, which adjusts all on-screen colors to more closely match that of a typical printer. Select Window -> Show printer colors -> Show profile colors to adjust the screen colors to match your selected print profile (set via the Utilities menu >Options > View).

Note: This does not alter the actual RGB or CMYK color values, it simply adjusts the screen color gamut to more closely match that of your printer.

Note: Some Adobe software, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, handles printer colors very differently. They only support one color model at a one time and will convert all colors to the current color model. e.g. when operating in CMYK mode, all RGB colors are converted to CMYK colors. They also show all CMYK colors as "printer simulated". Xara, on the other hand, supports mixed color models (you can use CMYK and RGB color in the same document) and does not alter the actual color value.