Show HN: An iPhone app that lets you pick colors and identify PANTONE colors | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An iPhone app that lets you pick colors and identify PANTONE colors

cone.app

112 points_kush57 comments

Hi HN,

A couple of years back, I posted the initial version of Cone on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14254357) and had received a great response. Cone is a smart color picker tool for the iPhone, which is delightful and very easy-to-use. Not only that, but it also lets you organize colors into buckets and identify PANTONE colors of the object around you (super helpful for interior, graphic, or package designers).

Cone is licensed by PANTONE, so it stays updated with all the new colors they release on time.

Another feature I'd like to highlight is the ability to identify hues of the colors around you. As a colorblind designer, it's super helpful for me to know whether a color is red or green just by pointing my phone's camera at it.

Since the initial version, a lot has changed and here's what the new version brings:

  - Ability to identify PANTONE colors
  - Pick colors from the images in the photo gallery
  - Collect and organize colors into buckets
  - Adjust the color temperature with a neutral grey card for improved accuracy
  - New design
  - Apple Watch companion app
  - and many under the hood improvements.

I would love to hear what everyone thinks about it!

What is "pantone"? That's missing from the website.

It's a palette of predefined colors. It's been used by the printing industry for many years, everyone who does any kind of professional graphic arts knows what it is. You can just tell the press operator "give me Pantone 68C" and they will know exactly what to give you. https://www.pantone.com/

Thanks

Also missing is: what is a "color"?

It might sound like a stupid question, but once you start thinking about it, it's not so simple. For example if you take a color and change the intensity of the light by a factor 2, is it the same color? Also due to overlapping spectra of cones in the human retina, different spectra can generate the same perception of color. Et cetera.

I'd assume that with something like intensity that as long as the "ratios" of "RGB" values so to speak stay the same, your brain would interpret it as the same color, but that's my thought!

Probably not true. Different shades of gray have (more or less) the same RGB ratios, but there exists a wide variety of PANTONE numbers for different shades of gray. (Simply put).

In typical technical contexts, 'color' usually gets it's meaning from CIE 1931 or a derivative of it. The science of human color perception is colorimetry. Photometry is the science of human perception of brightness. Philosophical skepticism deals with the shortcomings of this approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorimetry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_(optics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism

It's not the same color, no. Brown doesn't exist.

Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Oh boy, I spend like 3 months researching the scientific and objective background behind what color and light is.

I suggest reading this: http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs148-10-summer/docs/20...

Extremely excellent resource. I was gonna write a blog post summarizing my adventure until I found this. Basically what I was trying to write.

The palette is possible because of proprietary non-CYM(K) ink(s). What distinguishes the Pantone print colors is they are outside the CYM gamut. With web colors that's not the case, but by the time the web came around Pantone had established its value as a commercial service in support of color critical work.

This may be a stupid question, considering PANTONE sells a ridiculously expensive devices for similar purpose. Would someday PANTONE revoke the license so we could no longer use it?

Cone is licensed for more than two years now, and I am in the process of renewing the license for another three years. So, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Curious. How much does it cost to license?

I can't share the exact details due to NDA, but instead of a fixed fee, it's a royalty-based license. So I pay x% to Pantone on every sale.

Small suggestions (just based on the website copy): consider supporting other colour spaces, like Display-P3, DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, CIE... not sure what the source data from the camera can tell you though. LCH color picking based on CIE might also be useful http://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-h...

It’s worth pointing out that Pantone generally only matches print colours, and labels digital representations seemingly exclusively in sRGB, not wider colour spaces. https://www.pantone.com/color-intelligence/articles/technica... for the sRGB chart. Here’s an example exception: https://www.nanosysinc.com/blog/2012/12/11/color-of-the-year... Despite this, it has an sRGB hex value, so I’m not sure what to make of it. https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/17-5641-TCX It seems odd that Pantone lists these color values without listing absolute or relative values by named color space...

Can I use this to calibrate colors on screen? Can it register colors from an LCD panel?

How do you compensate for lighting conditions and differences between different phones' cameras when identifying pantone colours?

I'd expect Pantone to be precious about that sort of thing, as accurate reproduction is important to them - right?

User of initial version of the app here. This was my main issue with the app. Lighting conditions influenced the shot color significantly. Curious to learn from the author if the app tries to compensate in any way, and if that has been improved in V2.

Nice! Interesting you were able to agree on licensing with PANTONE®, considering they sell a (very underwhelming) hardware device called CAPSURE™ that has a similar premise: https://www.pantone.com/products/color-control-tools/capsure

Been using this for a month, the app is very well designed, and $5 is nothing compared to joy I get by collecting colours during commute and sharing the exact code when I am trying to design with physical world as an inspiration.

Thank you!

We need an open-source color standard. PANTONE has virtually no competition (RAL, etc are a minuscule % of the market share) and they charge exorbitant prices for their color chips. Standard should be open and anyone can make and sell color chips.

What i hate about every color picker is that its picking one exact color. If your‘re looking at a gradient every pixel will be different, but i want sometimes get an average of the color.

I faced the same problem, and hence Cone averages out the color inside the inner circle of the picker.

Doesn't that tend to give you washed out colours, though?

If there's a significant variation in the colors in that small area, then yes, the averaged out color will look washed out. In that case, you can simply pinch-to-zoom into the image for more accuracy.

That sounds neat! I'm just wondering how much lighting affects its decision?

Edit: just saw you mention about a grey card too, for calibration which sounds cool

This doesn't solve the issue of metamerism, though.

Sounds like a great app, if it would also map PANTONe colors with RAL colours and we are done :)

Nice suggestion. Seems like RAL is equivalent to Pantone but in Europe. I’ll look into its licensing and implement it if it’s not much of a headache :)

RAL is often used in manufacturing. Our powder coater used RAL colors for example.

RAL and HKS are German color systems, the first dating back to the 1920s and the latter to the 1960s.

Edit: love the app!

RAL is often use for paint. E.g. if you want to paint your building in Pantone you normally get it converted.

Well done, website looks great! I will check out the app when I get a chance

Just playing with it for 2min I can already tell it’s easily worth $3.99 for me. I love the UI—well done.

Super cool! Purchased. This may be beyond the scope of the project, but it would be cool if it could create buckets from a photo by automatically pulling out complementary and contrasting colors.

Thank you. I had actually implemented this feature (which worked by extracting 5 dominant colors from an image or the camera feed) but I couldn't figure out the best experience for it to go with the manual picking of colors. I am working on redesigning it and I'll add it as soon as I perfect the experience.

The website says: "accurately identifies upto ten Pantone® colors"

What is the ten referring to? Total times you can use it?

When you see the color details, it will show ten Pantone colors (five from the Coated and Uncoated guides each) matching that color, in the order of their match %.

Nice. Bought it and will try it out.

I also didn’t understand while reading it on the website. Probably worth rephrasing in order to make it clear.

Updated the copy to make it clear.

It’s $5 for the app, which the website fails to mention.

I see $3.99, not $5.

OP didn’t mention what country they’re in. Maybe their dollar is slightly less valuable (like the Canadian dollar)? Cause it’s $3.99 in the US, so CAD$4.99 would make sense (USD$4.99 is CAD$5.60)

Here's a free comment. Enjoy!

How do you know the price then?

Is it common for Show HN posts to be for paid products? I’ve not seen any/many of these in the years I’ve been on here, but I wonder what others think. I’ve seen waitlists before, but paid apps seem like a different thing.

Yes, I noticed that too. I don't recall ever seeing a paid product promoted like this. I.m.o. this kind of post comes very, very close to the line between information and spam.

> I.m.o. this kind of post comes very, very close to the line between information and spam.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

This post is "Hey, I built a cool thing! It costs me money to run so I charge for its use." Their last post about this app was for the initial version released like two years ago. Two posts across a couple years hardly constitutes "spam" by any regularly used definition I am aware of.

This app also addresses a unique problem in a way that is straightforward and elegant, and was improved upon as a direct result of comments from HN, so it has close ties to this community. Why would the author not post here with information about the update?

By itself it might be spammy but the author's replies here have been interesting and welcome.

Where are you coming up with Show HN is not for paid products? It's not against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and HN is run by a VC firm...

I didn’t say it was against the rules, just wondering if it is as uncommon as I think it is.

Perhaps someone can point me to links of recent/popular Show HN posts for paid (not freemium) products?

Actually, the rules say that Show HN is for things that “other people can play with”. You can’t exactly play with an app that is paid, and you also can’t “try it out, ask questions, and then give feedback”.

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

Why can't you play with an app that is paid?

I'd think that any product from an indie developer or small startup would be welcome on HN.

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