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
Well, one, not everything can be represented by RGB. The RGB color gamut (the colors you can produce by mixing pure red, green, and blue) does not even [close](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model#/media/File:CIExy1931_sRGB_gamut_D65.png) to cover all possible colors. There are many colors, particularly the richer shades of teal, green, and greenish-blue, that can’t be displayed that way. More generally, **no finite set of primary colors can produce every chromaticity** (combination of hue, which is what ‘type’ of color it is, and saturation, which is how intensely colored). Such a finite set would produce some straight-sided polygon in the space of possible colors, which can’t represent the smoothly curved available space (and, in practice, such a set would also require maximally saturated colors, which real dyes and the like don’t produce).
For two, since different purposes use different mixes of pigments, the spaces each thing can cover vary. Your printer colors, for example, don’t align with the colors your monitor can produce, because printers are using subtractive primaries (which absorb light) rather than glowing colors in the monitor (which add light). One common color space for printers is CMYK (for **c**yan, **m**agenta, **y**ellow, and **k**ey [i.e., black, used to darken colors]), and you can [see](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model#/media/File:CIE1931xy_gamut_comparison.svg) that CMYK and sRGB have different available colors.
And for three, different monitors and other forms of display show things differently. If you want to be able to design a shirt on your computer, then reproduce it in fabric dyes, you need to understand the relationship between those two color systems.
—–
Which brings us to pantone. Pantones don’t actually represent any specific mix of pigments, like RGB or CMYK. Instead, they represent an abstract idea of a color that can be consistently represented across different methods of displaying one. Each pantone has *representations* in RGB or CMYK or whatever else, provided that the color it represents is inside their gamuts, but the pantone is independent of those specific representations.
It’s kind of like the idea of the number two existing separately from the symbol 2 (used to write it in Arabic numerals) or the symbol 二 (the Chinese character for this number), or tally marks like ||, or the spelling t-w-o. These are all representations, appropriate to specific situations, of the abstract idea of the number two.
In practice, using pantones lets you design “in pantone”, and then implement that design across a wide range of possible materials and means of producing color. Each pantone can be handled consistently, and then implemented in whatever means of producing color support that pantone in their gamuts, so that purple on your screen and purple on a printed page and purple on a shirt all look exactly the same.
—–
EDIT: Hello, /r/all. Before you feel super smart and go “um a 5 year old wouldn’t understand that” you should read the sidebar:
> LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations – not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds.
Latest Answers