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?
In: 16
There are broadly two kinds of ways that humans make colour pictures: reflective colour and emissive colour. Because they work in completely different ways, they use different colours mixtures to get roughly the same results.
Reflective colour is what you see when white light hits an object and some of it gets reflected back into your eyes. An object we see as white reflects most of the light that hits it. Something that looks red only reflects red light and absorbs the other wavelengths like blue and green.
Colour printers use this phenomenon by layering together four different coloured inks. Cyan absorbs red and reflects blue and green. Magenta absorbs green and reflects red and blue. Yellow absorbs blue and reflects red and green. Finally, black (represented by the K in CMYK) absorbs everything.
To print a bright red in CMYK, you overlay very fine dots of yellow and magenta, which absorb the blue and green light respectively and mostly red light. It isn’t perfect, which is why colour printers can struggle to get exact colour reproduction, but it’s pretty close.
Emissive colour uses tiny red, blue, and green lights to directly produce the wavelengths of light your eyes perceive as colour (it doesn’t need black because it can just dim the lights). Because it’s using a completely different colour mixing system, translating one to the other is inexact. This is why you might design a colour image on a computer, print it out, and be surprised at how different the colours look. The computer and printer are doing their best to translate the RGB information into CMYK, but because it isn’t a one-to-one match, there’s a bit of fudging involved.
Pantone colours are a special case, because official Pantone inks mix all kinds of colours, not just CMYK (same with a paint mixer in a hardware shop). When you use Pantone colours, it’s usually because you plan to send the final image to a professional printing shop that stocks official Pantone inks. When you pay for Pantone, you’re paying for a 100% colour match with no guesswork, though for best results you’ll want to make sure your computer monitor is correctly calibrated to give you the most accurate preview possible.
Sorry that was so long. Hope it helps!
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