How is that Pantone colors don’t have direct RGB counterparts?

Question

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

Answer 1

You know of Red, Green, Blue.
But really there is also Hue, Saturation, Chroma.
That makes a crazy huge number of more colours from what is seemingly an infinite rainbow.