Comment by _kush | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _kush | Hacker News Reader

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!

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...

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.

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

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.

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