Please help me do my job: How to I use Pantone colours in Adobe Illustrator?

[MrsCardone]

Does anyone know? I've been trying to work it out for hours. Thanks!

What exactly do you need to know?
How to add them to the colours palette?

@MrsCardone I'm just rushing out, assuming you need to open the Pantone palette, goes like this

Open the swatches tool
Too right corner click the three lines for the extra menu drop down,
Go down near the bottom, 'open swatch library'
Hover and open 'Color books'
That expands all the Pantone books, select the one you need

@beingsunny Thanks, I managed to open the Pantone Colour Book, but there are no colours inside. I tried putting the colour I want into the search bar, but nothing comes up.

What version of illustrator are you using?

@beingsunny Creative Cloud. I am unsure which version.

Hmm, Adobe has an agreement with Pantone but seems they haven't updated the colours in a few years, is it all the Pantone books which are missing or some? Apparently some of the newer ones aren't yet available.

@beingsunny Ah, OK. This is so hard. I am trying to coordinate some colours and every source I have is different. And then when you print them they look NOTHING like they do on the screen.

Are you actually having the print job done using spot colours?

Pantone website should have a colour to CMYK/RGB converter, they won't be exact obviously but unless the printer is actually printing spot colours you need to use the conversions anyway.

Pantone used to have a converter, but now you have to pay for it. Having already paid a fortune for the books, I don't want to have to pay more for the converter.

It has been many years since I've worked with Pantone but we always had colour books, so you could see a real version of the printed colour. You really will struggle to work in Pantone without one unless things have drastically changed.

@ItsAlwaysThere I've got the colour books, but I don't have Pantone within Illustrator, which is the problem.

Sorry. I'm in bed unwell and misread.

@ItsAlwaysThere Sorry to hear you’re unwell .

If you are designing something for print, then you have to go with what the colours look like in your physical swatch book.

If the colours you are looking at on screen are totally different then you need to calibrate your screen.

If you are using cmyk rather than spot then you can always make the colours you want yourself using the cmyk separation given in your swatch book.

@notaflyingmonkey How do I calibrate my screen? I didn’t even know that was an option!

@notaflyingmonkey Also, what is the CMYK separation? Is it anything to do with these numbers on the swatches?

I used a different swatch book that has the cmyk breakdown in it.

This is how apple suggest calibrating your monitor:
support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp1109/mac

Are you saying that Illustrator no longer has the pantone library? What about Indesign?

I just did a quick google and you can use I colourpalette to converge the Pantone colours, I get this doesn't help if you need the actual Pantone swatches.

Can you open the P swatches in photoshop and save the pallete with your required colours to import into illustrator?