This feature would be awesome.

Photoshop gives you the closest Pantone Solid color--not necessarily the same as the equivalent color.

CS3

Art containing two non-global process colors has been selected, and the Live Color dialog opened:


Below, the Pantone solid coated library has been selected from the Limit to Library popup menu, which causes an immediate lookup of the closest matching color in the library to every color in the selected art (notice that the brown is a tiny bit redder and the green a little yellower, showing you that the replacements have happened):


The sliders above have also been switched to Tint and a new color group was created by clicking on the little folder with the + sign above the color group list. These two steps are not necessary, I just wanted to show that they were possible. Also it was the best way to display the names of both Pantone colors.

If all you want to do is recolor your document with the same number of Pantone colors that your design uses distinct mixed colors, you're done!

All the rest of this post is just showing more variations of what you can do, especially reducing the number of spot colors used when the original document has more color variation than you want.

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Here I have switched to the metallic library:


If the selected art had contained more original colors than desired number of spot colors, then you can enter the number of desired spot colors to reduce to, and it will pick the best color set of that size from the chosen library to "posterize" to, as shown below:

After reduction to two colors:

After limiting to ANPA library:


Next I've switched to the Color Wheel view, and rotated the color markers to a different position. When limiting to a library, the entire color wheel is drawn using only the colors in that library, so that you can easily navigate to nearby colors:


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Swatches from Color Books and other libraries can be accessed in the Color Picker, but only when it is opened from within the Live Color dialog (by double-clicking on any color well) while limiting to that library. This gives you another method of picking a different color if you don't like the default match.


There is not yet any ability to switch libraries while the Color Picker is open, but we hope to enable that in CS4.

Wow is right.

I would imagine that it would take the created CMYK color, then match it to the closest Pantone-to-CMYK conversion. Unless I'm wrong, that seems pretty simple.

Michele Garcia, the Art Director's Toolkit is pretty useful for this in my experience as well.

Also you can the go to the color guide panel and which will give you many more option that just the nearest swatch but a whole group of harmonies.

Now keep in mind once you get use to something it is very hard to change even if it is a vast improvement. So no one is trying to convince you that will happen over time.

And saving these as color groups are also cool. Especially for future use.

Is there a way in Photoshop to click on a pantone color that is part of the art work and have that pantone color and its number appear in a block as part of the art work, so that you know what pantone colors were used in the document??

im haveing a huge irritation useing illustrator cs4 live paint bucket because i can use everything else apart from the paint bucket which should be the easyiest tool to use sometimes it works with the white arrow sometimes it doesnt i sometimes get this below message

the selection contains objects that cannot be converted. live paint groups can only contain paths and compound paths. clipping paths are not allowed

the lines which i have drawn are connected which i believe have to be in order to use the paint bucket and i have no clipping paths so i am am baffled

presume it is because the line is set to 0.01 it seems the live paint bucket wont notice thin lines, but i tried makeing the line thicker so i could use the paint bucket and it still doesnt work

chris