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
Quick thought experiment.
If the all the rulers in the world were gone, how would we know how long 1cm is?
Now honestly in our day to day lives, we could probably estimate it and each person might have a slightly different measurement off by a mm or two, but not a big deal.
But if you need to be really exact, like for engineering, you all need to agree on what exactly is that length down to the nano-meter or whatever.
Same with color. RGB is like everyone estimating colors and it may be a little (or a lot) off from one monitor to the next. But Pantone makes and licences out THE rulers for color, makes sure they all match, etc.
Sure, someone else could make their own “rulers for color” standard (with blackjack and hookers), but then you need a huge mass of people to all agree to change over to the new standard for it to be useful.
For most people in their day to day, hex codes and rgb (or equivalent cmyks) are just fine. But pantone is extra granular to make sure you are all using the SAME reference.
Edit: Also, I find this really interesting. There’s an object that was for a long time used as THE ideal 1kg. [The International Prototype of the Kilogram] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the_Kilogram).
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