I read recently that Photoshop had Pantone colors, but recently Adobe’s Pantone license expired, so images created using Pantone colors simply lost that part of the image.
I’m not an expert on color, but isn’t almost anything represented by RGB? Why aren’t those colors just … colors? With specific number values that are encoded? Can these colors not be understood through regular web hex codes?
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Most printed material you see uses something called “four color process” printing. Four ink colors — cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — are printed in tiny dots of varying sizes in order to create the colors you see. If you examine some junk mail or photos in a textbook very closely, you’ll see these tiny dots.
These tiny dots are placed onto the paper by separate cyan, magenta, yellow, and black print mechanisms. That’s why ink jet printers have a black cartridge and a CMY cartridge. Some even have separate C, M, and Y cartridges. The same for laser printers. In commercial printing, there are separate ink wells and printing “plates” for each color.
Pantone colors are pre-mixed inks. Instead of printing individual dots of each color component, the ink pigments are pre-mixed and applied as the final color. This method gives you much better control over the final color, and it allows you to completely cover the paper with ink. Using the dots in four color process, you can only put down so much color before your start to get muddy colors.
This color palette limitation of the four color process (CMYK) is called a color space. The color space Tells you all the possible colors you can create using a particular color process. In print, we deal with the limitations of the CMYK color space. On screen, we deal with the limitations of the RGB color space. The RGB color space is larger than the CMYK color space, but by pre-mixing ink pigments, you can expand beyond the traditional CMYK color space.
Pantone also puts a lot of work into building color palettes that are consistent between CMYK, RGB, and pre-mixed Pantone colors. We take color consistency for granted. Matching a red on screen, in print, and in a fabric is incredibly difficult. Pantone let’s you pick a specific red color out of a color book, then provides ink formulas to accurately reproduce that red anywhere.
This is why Pantone is so popular with designers. It’s a tool that solves an incredibly common problem: color matching.
So many Pantone colors do have RGB counterparts, but Pantone “owns” the mapping of Pantone color to RGB. Adobe can’t use these mappings without paying for a license. What’s crazy is that this system has been around for decades. For as long as there have been digital publishing tools, software publishers have been buying licenses. It’s really remarkable that things have broken down to this point. Pantone is central to a very large part of the design industry across many types of media.
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