Spot/Process colours. What is the difference?
The difference between spot colours and process colours is simple. Spot colours are mixed to specification like paint, you can still specify Pantone colours for print, but when they are printed as spot colour, PANTONE 151 C is a bright orange ink that is printed as it mixed. Process colours are not solid colours at all, but an optical illusion that is mixed in the eye when you are looking at them. If you look at a coloured panel in a magazine under a magnifying glass you will see that the colour is made up of a pattern of varying sized dots:- cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). In this case PANTONE 151 C is made up of 0% Cyan 62% Magenta 75% Yellow and 0% Black dots and isn’t quite as bright as the spot colour version.
