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
So the science of color is actually pretty weird. It doesn’t behave as simply as you think.
Color behaves differently depending on how it’s made. For instance, mixing all the paint (pigment, subtractive) together will make black, but mixing all the light together (light, additive) will make white. Pantone deals with pigments, and RGB deals with light. They’re so different that there some colors are only available in light (RGB) that don’t exist in pigments (Pantone).
(Without getting too into it, that’s actually why cartoons nowadays are so much more vibrant and brighter. Everything is now made with RGB tools for RGB screens, and we skip the pigment stage from when things were painted on paper.)
Think of it like asking why there isn’t a direct conversion between gallons and pounds. They both seem to measure the same thing at a glance, but they’re actually different.
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