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).
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