Pantone. I get RGB and CMYK but how does Pantone fit in all this?
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RGB and CMYK are models of how to define and produce colors, both additive and subtractive. Pantone is a company centered around *color matching*, something important when transitioning between different mediums.
For example if you have a glowing screen it is going to be producing color by mixing red, green, and blue light. But if you have a printed image it will be producing the image by mixing pigments of cyan, magenta, yellow, and “key” which is generally black. Pigments absorb some light and reflect a portion so it is like trying to arrive at the same destination starting from different directions.
What Pantone does is provide a way of making sure that a color is the same between for example printed media, dyed clothing, and molded plastic. Plastic isn’t typically going to be colored using CMYK pigments so there needs to be some way of conveying to a distant factory exactly what color the product should come out as. If both the designers and factory are using Pantone’s product, describing their desired colors out of the Pantone library and comparing against Pantone color chips, then a color match can be arrived at with relatively little trouble (for a not insignificant infusion of cash to Pantone).
CMYK and RGB are both methods of mixing up a color. Similar to mixing pigments but different enough. Think of these as recipes.
However Pantone is able to produce consistent colors for everyone to match against. Which means you’re able to say a recipe makes “xyZ” color and other people know what you mean.
The eye can see many more colors than we have words to describe so someone sat down and named them all.
Cmyk and rgb have only a certain range of colours they can reproduce, this their colour gamut or range, the output varies based on multiple factors, different screens, different printers. Pantone is a colour standard to get consistent colour in Cmyk and gives us the ability to print outside the Cmyk colour range think neon colours as an example
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