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).
The point of Pantone is to tag a color and say “This is Pantone Baby’s Butt Pink” and when that image gets printed, the printer knows that it’s supposed to be Pantone Baby’s Butt Pink and they also have a real life physical reference to that exact color and can tell if the printer printed it correctly or not. Also when you decided on that color, you also had that physical reference in your hand and decided that you liked it, and you can expect it to be *exactly* that once printed.
If you just choose a color that looks good on your monitor, you’ll get RGB values but you have no idea if it only looks good to you because your monitor is badly calibrated, and you don’t know if it will look good when printed. Actually no matter how good your monitor is, colors will look different on a monitor than on paper. So by using an RGB color you’re already starting off with an error.
Sure, a Pantone color can be approximated via RGB but no one really cares about its RGB values, because there’s a much more accurate way to refer to that color: the physical swatch that you bought (at a very high price). Now all you have to do is make sure that everyone knows that you’re using that exact color by name, rather than by RGB values.
Maybe “Baby’s Butt Pink” is a totally different color value on one printer than it is on another. All that matters is that they know what that specific color is supposed to look like, and can calibrate their printer until they get it right. If it was just a random RGB value, no one would know what it should look like, because there is no universal agreement on what RGB(253, 229, 250) should look like in real life. One printer might print it a bit pinker than the other, which one is better?
Once you convert Pantone to RGB, your image may look exactly the same on the monitor, but you’ve now lost continuity with that physical swatch, and the printer won’t know how it’s supposed to look, and no one will know what that RGB value is supposed to look like in the end once it gets printed.
Pantone has been around since the 50’s. It was invented by a printer and is a set of reproducible ink combinations. We would spec Pantone as accents in a two- or three-color job. Usually 2-color. It was much more budget friendly than constantly spec’ing 4-c (CMYK) and paying for separations. It went on from there.
RGB and CMYK are like recipes. With each value an ingredient to make a colour.
Just like in the food world, the problem with recipes is that if two different people source their ingredients (a metaphor for ink and screen pixels) from different places, they may be trying to make the same food but the end result will probably taste slightly different.. sometimes it can taste completely different.
Pantone isn’t really like a recipe. It’s more of a definition. In our metaphor, it’s like ordering your favourite brands version of the food, its made in the same way, in very controlled conditions and is likely to taste and look the same every time you use it.
Pantone colours within Adobe software are referred to as “spot colours” and when you save these properly into a print file (like pdf), they tell the printer to use specifically loaded inks into a printer.
An approximate value can be used, but because the printer instruction is lost without the license it makes sense to completely ruin what the image looks like, as if you just save this and sent it to the printer, they would use a CYMK value instead.. and this is usually never preferred if you are using spot colours in the first place.
TL;DR
RGB and CMYK are ingredients, pantone is a definition. You can’t always get to the result by using similar ingredients.. to be safe and consistent removing the colour is better than changing it, as it’s more obvious something has changed from when you last printed that document.
(Edited for clarity and formatting)
There are multiple different color spaces that have different degrees of vibrance for RGB and in-between.
sRGB uses 256 shades per color. So while this totals >16M combos, if you want a shade of red to be 137.5, you’ll have to settle for 137 or 138.
Also, printers use ink, not light, and are using CMYK (K is for black, not used a lot in standard colors, moreso metallic and gold-ish). CMYK can go more vibrant for green but less so for blue/purple. It uses 0-100 for all 4, totaling 104M combos.
Printer calibration is a huge issue. My mother uses Walmart for Christmas photos and every time they look like crap. A huge benefit of Pantone is that print shops order Pantone books of swatches (stupid expensive) and they calibrate their printers are accurate, so if your digital file is using a specific Pantone color, then that is exactly was is getting printed.
Now, some shops give out their ICC profiles and you can download them it’ll show you what your image will look like from that printer. However, you are still looking at it from a digital screen emitting light and not a printed surface reflecting light.
Rgb is the medium your screen operates on. Pantone operates in cmyk which is a mix of inks. That’s why those are 2 different volumes. Even if you match a pantone on your screen it’s gonna look different on mine. The # is the same but the look is different on both screens
the images on the computer could, but that was never the value of pantone.
pantone is both a system of representing color and a standard with reference samples FOR those colors on or in various materials and processes.
when your #34a29c isn’t as #34a29c as it is supposed to be you end up with a finger pointing game and likely no real resolution.
when your “Viva Magenta 18-1750” isn’t right you bust out your $10k sample set from pantone and tell the vendor to get f’ed and remake the product.
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!
Most printed material you see uses something called “four color process” printing. Four ink colors — cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — are printed in tiny dots of varying sizes in order to create the colors you see. If you examine some junk mail or photos in a textbook very closely, you’ll see these tiny dots.
These tiny dots are placed onto the paper by separate cyan, magenta, yellow, and black print mechanisms. That’s why ink jet printers have a black cartridge and a CMY cartridge. Some even have separate C, M, and Y cartridges. The same for laser printers. In commercial printing, there are separate ink wells and printing “plates” for each color.
Pantone colors are pre-mixed inks. Instead of printing individual dots of each color component, the ink pigments are pre-mixed and applied as the final color. This method gives you much better control over the final color, and it allows you to completely cover the paper with ink. Using the dots in four color process, you can only put down so much color before your start to get muddy colors.
This color palette limitation of the four color process (CMYK) is called a color space. The color space Tells you all the possible colors you can create using a particular color process. In print, we deal with the limitations of the CMYK color space. On screen, we deal with the limitations of the RGB color space. The RGB color space is larger than the CMYK color space, but by pre-mixing ink pigments, you can expand beyond the traditional CMYK color space.
Pantone also puts a lot of work into building color palettes that are consistent between CMYK, RGB, and pre-mixed Pantone colors. We take color consistency for granted. Matching a red on screen, in print, and in a fabric is incredibly difficult. Pantone let’s you pick a specific red color out of a color book, then provides ink formulas to accurately reproduce that red anywhere.
This is why Pantone is so popular with designers. It’s a tool that solves an incredibly common problem: color matching.
So many Pantone colors do have RGB counterparts, but Pantone “owns” the mapping of Pantone color to RGB. Adobe can’t use these mappings without paying for a license. What’s crazy is that this system has been around for decades. For as long as there have been digital publishing tools, software publishers have been buying licenses. It’s really remarkable that things have broken down to this point. Pantone is central to a very large part of the design industry across many types of media.
Most designers would never use RGB in place of Pantone because they serve two totally different purposes.
**RGB is used for web design**. It’s got [the best color range of any color model](https://beedevildesign.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/color_gamut.png) (though you’ll notice that it still can’t recreate any color, and it can’t even recreate every Pantone color), but those colors are created through light, which mixes colors very differently than pigment. Anything that you print out (posters, business cards, etc.) will use pigments, not light. So **RGB can’t be used for printing purposes**. If you’ve ever printed a file that was designed using RGB values, it was most likely run through an RGB to CYMK converter prior to printing.
**So, in printing, we really have two options – CYMK or Pantone.** When you print something using your printer at home, you are using a CYMK printing process. Let’s say that you are printing [this picture of a frog](https://i.natgeofe.com/k/8fa25ea4-6409-47fb-b3cc-4af8e0dc9616/red-eyed-tree-frog-on-leaves-3-2_3x2.jpg). In order to keep costs low and simplify the printing process, you [generally](https://www.lifewire.com/4-6-8-color-process-printing-1077448) aren’t actually printing any green or orange ink. Instead, your printer is basically printing different parts of the same image four times, [layering tiny cyan (C), yellow (Y), magenta (M), and black (K) dots](https://www.printplace.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Why-Printing-Uses-CMYK-Image-5.jpg) across the page in a way that tricks your eye into thinking that those colors are mixed together ([pointillism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism#/media/File:Georges_Seurat_-_A_Sunday_on_La_Grande_Jatte_–_1884_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) works off of the same principle).
Meanwhile, **Pantone colors are pre-mixed**. They are usually only used by designers because they have to be specially selected and ordered. Each Pantone color has a very specific formula that ensures that each batch of color is identical, kind of like how [Home Depot mixes its paint colors](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9-fcGKQzx6U). In contrast, CYMK can result in [slight color variances](https://printninja.com/printing-resource-center/printing-academy/advanced-concepts/color-variance/) depending on when and where it was printed.
For the average person, it probably doesn’t matter, but for larger companies, they want consistency. A company like [McDonald’s](https://usbrandcolors.com/mcdonalds-colors/) might want to ensure that [their French Fry containers are always the same shade of red](https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article13792507.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200/1_McDonalds-Shares-Hit-Record-High-After-Strong-Earnings-Report.jpg). You’ve probably printed an image that came out looking funky because your printer was low on ink. Pantone doesn’t have that problem because it only has to ensure the quality of one ink color, instead of trying to calibrate and balance the quality of four or more cartridges.
Lastly, Pantone can print certain kinds of ink that CYMK can’t, like neon or metallic ink.
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**ELI5 explanation:** CYMK is like trying to drawing a picture using four colored pencils; Pantone is like ordering specific premade colored pencils to draw with.
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