Can you mix 2 or more Pantone colors to create a new color?

[bajingan]

I have a color that doesn't exactly match to any Pantone colors available. Can you mix 2 or more Pantone colors to create a new color by mixing the colors on the pixel or dot basis such as this:

[colormix.com ]

If the answer is yes, is there a tool that allows you to do this in Photoshop?

Thanks.

[rickwells]

What is the object here? Will you be printing something in a special colour on paper. I find it amazing that you can't find a pantone reference close enough for your purposes. Your printer can mix pantone inks but what are you going to give him as a reference? That's the purpose of pantone swatches.
It's pointless trying to match pantone colours to that degree on a monitor screen ( if that's what you are trying to do ). Or is it I don't understand your question.

[bajingan]

I don't understand. Are you saying the only way a printer would know what color to print is by telling him what Pantone color that is? What if your artwork consists of hundreds or even thousands of different colors such as in a colorful photograph of your grandma in a Mardi Gras costume? Would you need to give him a Pantone number for each and every square dot of the picture or he would have no clue what to do? Why can't a software do this for you? Why can Photoshop have a Pantone mode? Isn't there a software or tool that can convert any RGB color to the closest Pantone color automatically down by the pixel? And if there's no close match, why can't this tool create the color by combining 2 or more different Pantone colors to create the illusion of the color as what I described in my original post? As a Web person, I must admit I know very little about this Pantone coloring for print media, but the more I learn about it the more I realize how manual, primitive and unnecessarily complicated the system is. I understand coloring is very complicated for the print media, but what's shocking to me is the lack of simple solution for it. I bet someone is making a fortune out of this. Or maybe I'm just missing something.

[rickwells]

Perhaps it's me that didn't understand your question.
Let me make a few points. I think you are correct in saying you don't understand the printing process. I am not an expert on web work although I have produced a few websites. Pincipally I am from a print background.
Don't try to compare web work with the rules for outputting for print. So you produce a design in Photoshop which includes a picture of your granny in that wonderful outfit. You send a disc to your printer who will convert this into 4 printing plates - one plate for each colour C cyan, M magenta, Y yellow and K black. Each colour is deposited, one after another, on to the sheet of paper and hey presto you have 2 thousand, or whatever the print run, pictures of your granny.
How close the colours are to the original picture depends on the quality of the scan or digital pic and how well you have handled the colour correction in Photoshop. You would need to get a pre-press proof to check how accurate the colours are ( and it is the final proof that the printer uses to check his colours ). If your monitor is not showing colour very accurately you may be shocked at how different the proof looks. So you have a particular colour that you want to incorporate somewhere in your picture. You might make a selection and change the colour to whatever you want. Unless your monitor is high quality and colour calibrated it's down to luck whether that colour will be the same when the job is printed. Remember the printing press reproduces all colours in your picture with varying percentages of just 4 colours and it is not possible to reproduce every colour on earth! You can run a spot colour mixed from the pantone range but this would need a fifth plate and either run on a 5 colour press or be a 2nd pass through the 4 colour press. Modern digital, presses work on some different principles but still rely basically on the CMYK process.

[mivox]

A *good* printer will know what colors to print if you give them a photoshop file. The Photoshop file has the CMYK values, and can be separated into 4 color plates.

You don't NEED to use Pantone for anything, really. It's just a color matching system that has sample print color-swatch books so you know exactly how each ink will print. It's good for logos and spot color. If you're not going for ohmygawd 100% precision, forget you ever heard the word. And no, you would never use Pantone for a photograph. That would be completely impossible.

TALK TO YOUR PRINTER. Don't rely on a forum to give you the pre-press advice you need for a print job, if you don't have any experience with print work. Contact the printer you will be using for the job, and ASK THEM what their file format and color requirements are.

And one last piece of advice: Posts are A WHOLE LOT easier to read and interpret if you hit the return key once in a while... ;)