Although I have no RGB colors in the document but special colors in PANTONE.
If you are mixing Spot and Process colors, the color preview options get more complex.
Here I have 2 color fills—a saturated RGB pink that would not be printable with CMYK inks, and a PANTONE solid Spot color that also has no process CMYK equivalent, and my Transparency Blend Space is set to CMYK.
If I turn off Overprint/Separation Preview the two colors display unchanged (the PANTONE 909 spot color is defined as a Lab color for display)
![Screen Shot 3.png]()
If I turn on Overprint Preview, the RGB Pink fill displays in the documents CMYK space as it will print, but the PANTONE Spot color is unchanged because it will output as an extra spot plate and wont be converted into CMYK.
![Screen Shot 4.png]()
If I add transparency to the page and leave Overprint Preview on, I get the same preview—the RGB fill is previewed as CMYK and the Spot color is unchanged:
![Screen Shot 5.png]()
However, if I turn off Overprint Preview the Spot color gets previewed as its CMYK process equivalent—or how it would print if it were set to Process in Ink Manager.
Overprint turned off:
![Screen Shot 6.png]()
Mixing spot color, process color, and transparency makes for complex color management, so if you are using the Pantone solid ink system for picking color, but don’t intend to output extra spot color plates, set the Pantone swatches’ Color Type to Process.