A tint is a screened (lighter) version of a color. Tinting is an economical way to make additional spot color variations without having to pay for additional spot color inks. Tinting is also a quick way to create lighter versions of process colors, although it ���doesn’t reduce the cost of printing process colors. As with non-tinted colors, it’s ���best to name and store tints in the Swatches panel so that you can easily edit all instances of that tint in your document.

Spot color and tints

A tint of a spot color is printed on the same printing plate as the spot color. A tint of a process color multiplies each of the CMYK process inks by the tint percentage; for example, an 80% tint of C10 M20 Y40 K10 results in C8 M16 Y32 K8.

Because colors and tints update together, if you edit a swatch, all objects that use a tint of that swatch update accordingly. You can also edit the base swatch of a named tint using the Swatch Options command in the Swatches panel menu; this updates any other tints based on the same swatch.

The tint range in Adobe Creative Suite 3 is 0% to 100%; the lower the number, the lighter the tint.