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Comment by dchia | Hacker News Reader

Can someone tell me what value does Pantone bring to the table? As a man-on-the-street I fail to understand what they are claiming for. Is this about the naming Pantone has given to a particular Hex Code?

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My understanding is that the entire suite of colors is calibrated by material, among other things. #aabbcc on the screen does not look like #aabbcc when painted onto wood, or from plastic injection moulding. But Pantone Color #32 will be absolutely identical everywhere.

It’s worse than that. ‘#aabbcc’ does not exist outside of your screen. ‘#aabbcc’ is not a color. Colors are complicated: https://poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html

PANTONE colors are specific mixes of pigments, not RGB or CMYK values. A PANTONE color includes elements like texture and lustre in its definition that cannot be captured in primary-color systems like RGB or CMYK. Certain trademark shades, like Tiffany blue, are captured as PANTONE colors as well. PANTONE is the standard for print graphic design because a designer will always know exactly how a PANTONE color will look on paper whereas significant calibration is necessary to get a consistent appearance from RGB or CMYK colors.

Yes indeed, the lustre makes a huge difference with some colours - sometimes even affecting the perceived hue, not just the vibrance - Pantone 136C vs 136U for example. Same ink, different paper.

From what I recall, its about phyiscal to virtual color matching, so pantone offers samples of say plastic with the exact matching color as the virtual ones, so you can pick a color, tell the manufacturer you want the plastic molded that color and be pretty sure you'll get the right color of product (or if not you can go back to them and tell them to do it according to spec).

You'd also want to calibrate your monitor accordingly of course

Of course at that point you're already bought into the ecosystem with physical samples (which are not cheap), monitor calibration and all, so it feels like a "double dip" for no value added

It's not really a double dip. It's more like a triple dip, as they charge the designers for the physical samples, then they charge the designers in order to reference those physical samples in their Photoshop designs, and then they charge the printers in order to produce the output that the Photoshop files are referencing.

So… they charge people for using their cross-referencing system is what you mean?

It’s no more triple dipping than two people each needing their copy of photoshop to work on the same psd.

They want to make sure you pay at every single point where you might think "PANTONE®". So in addition of having to buy the PANTONE® sample book in order to actually know what the PANTONE® colours are, you now need to pay to reference the PANTONE® colours in a Photoshop document so that the receiving party knows which PANTONE® colours they need to get out of a printer.

If they could make you pay for sending an email containing "I need the background to be in PANTONE® Red 032 C", they would.

I would argue that a multi-sided marketplace isn't always a double dip. If I want a Pantone 628 C coffee mug from China, I can order it and know exactly what colour I'm getting. It saves designers tons of money and time with avoided back-and-forth in the prototyping process.

You'll never get exact matching colors between a digital representation and a physical sample - there are too many variables at play an distinct physical differences that can't be made up.

I have never found the Pantone hexs to be particularly close to even the basic coated/uncoated guide colors, either, despite having about as good of a color matching setup as one can get at the prosumer level (and do not see how going from the four-digit to five-digit range would close the gap in color accuracy on thee hexes)

As someone with 3 Pantone decks and 2 RAL decks within arm's reach while writing this, I've never understood the value proposition of these virtual libraries beyond a quick and dirty starting point for digital representation. When something goes to print, your printer isn't going to be comparing against what it looks like digitally, either. They'll either use their proprietary spot ink/dye mix/etc., or pull out their guide and compare physical to physical.

Every time I've sent stuff to a printer that has spot color in it, they've wanted it manually referenced as well, so I've never been able to just hand over an EPS or PDF that had spot color in it and get it done without additional work anyway.

Yes, at best with experience a designer can visualize how a particular color will look in print when they see it on screen.

But that's true when viewing anything to be printed on-screen.

The only way to get there is to do a lot of printing.

It’s not just the rgb value. Using a specific Pantone color ensures that when you get it printed or manufactured it’s the color that you expect.

...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer (by specifying a Pantone color). What this $15 subscription is for is technically just that set of mappings built-in into Photoshop.

It’s not really, you wouldn’t choose these colors from RGB/CMYK you’d use a sample book. It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use.

You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team.

$15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.

> It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use.

That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.

And then you'd probably not get what you expect since your CMYK printer isn't calibrated like the print shop's printer is, despite having the same kind of paint.

You get what you want, because you use a Pantone color to match it. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

However, for Photoshop specifically, the only use of that information is to display an RGB approximation.

(although with uncalibrated printer you'd be screwed one way or another, I guess)

> ...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer.

That’s not going to work, because the natures of the different surface will make a given RGB/CMYK perceptually differ.

Think display calibration, except a lot worse.

The point of the Pantone system is that they’ve done the legwork to get perceptual matchings across surfaces, and design paint mix recipes to achieve reproducible matching. That’s what you’re paying for.

Of course it's going to work, it's the exact same thing except you communicate the Pantone color out of band instead of embedding it in PSD metadata.

This. So much this. The Pantone system covers displays, materials of all types, paper of all types, and fabrics. The same Pantone color will look exactly the same on all those materials. That's why it's the standard and not just for graphic artists, but also for manufacturing, fashion, and other industries I'm probably not even aware of.

It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here.

Let's say I want to print something in Pantone 123 (careful, Fluke might go after me!) I send over a design artifact that uses the color #ffc72b. Now, when it comes time for printing, the printer can't print RGB, but I also specify the mapping "#ffc72b is actually Pantone 123".

The printer _uses Pantone 123_. We don't suffer any loss of color fidelity. We only use RGB/CMYK as stand-ins for the correct color.

Note there are millions (24-bit) or billions (32-bit, but I mean, you can use however many bits you want) of RGB/CMYKs and only thousands of Pantones. This mapping doesn't need to be lossy.

Yes, yes, yes, #ffc72b is not Pantone 123. But it _is_ if I say "map everything to the closest Pantone color."

>It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here.

Considering the part that quotes the original post is missing the whole "Pantone colour" bit, I feel like the post was edited afterwards.

I added the part in brackets afterwards to prevent further misunderstanding, but it doesn't change the meaning of the post, which was just to move the actual color definition out-of-band.

I have a terrible tendency to hit the send button too soon and then update the post multiple times with typo fixes and clarifications...

It changes the meaning massively. The original was just "pick a CMYK colour and then tell them what kind of paint you want it printed with", the latter is "pick a CMYK colour and then tell them what it actually need to look like".

"What kind of paint you want it printed with" assumed that it's already after matching it to whatever Pantone definition you're after given the materials/conditions/printing method etc., otherwise you're quite obviously not going to get the result you want.

Even better - you don't have to worry about it being "lossy" or not as you don't just map specific RGB color to Pantone; you're mapping whole color layers, so your layer is displayed in #ffc72b on screen, but you're telling the printer that this particular layer is supposed to come out as Pantone 123. This is the exact same thing that happens when you select Pantone 123 in Photoshop after paying for the subscription, except the "telling the printer" part is embedded in PSD file in that case.

It's very valuable if you're printing a single spot color on something. Instead of doing a cyan pass, a magenta pass, a yellow pass, and a black pass, you can just do a black pass and a pass of your spot color. Despite Pantone being a more expensive ink, you may end up spending less money because it allows you to simply use less ink, and fewer resources.

Not to mention when you supply a Pantone color, you will get exactly that color, no matter what print shop you go to (As long as they pay for Pantone inks).

It guarantees that the color will look on a product just like you selected it. In Germany we have an older system called RAL, which is sufficient for most use cases. For example if you ordered a window in RAL 7043 and need to repaint it, you can go to your next hardware store, oder some paint with that color code from any manufacturer, and colors will/should match. But the RAL system applies more or less only to the physical world.

Pantone brings consistency. If you specify a Pantone color, pay a printer to use the right Pantone inks on the right media (and pay for the level of experience for the printer to do this right), you can get exactly what you expect.

By which I mean your company logo will by the right color (assuming your logo was specified as a Pantone color).

When printed, of course.

The hubub is because the Pantone color pallets have been a convenient way of picking colors for many use cases where consistency doesn't matter enough to pay for Pantone inks and the class of printer who can do them right...which is almost all use cases, everywhere all the time.

Pantone created the onscreen colors to facilitate soft proofing. In the small segment of users using them for that, the cost of a license is trivial because clients who require Pantone colors already expect to pay the costs associated with using them.

By 'hex code' do you mean RGB or CMYK?

Pantone encodes more colours than those two.

Your last sentence is just wrong. Pantone encodes thousands of colors. RGB/CMYK can encode references to as many (within-gamut, but you can also hack around this) colors as you want, typically millions, often billions.

Sure, you might not get Pantone 123 if somebody asks for #ffc72b. But if somebody says "use Pantone colors only" and specifies #ffc72b, you're going to get Pantone 123.

> Your last sentence is just wrong.

How do you express metallic gold 817 using RGB.

Which of those components gives you how metallic it is? It's not even 1-1 as it depends on the paper used! Their own books show how lossy it is - they show the corresponding CMYK and it often barely matches.

> within-gamut

Ah so you already knew it wasn't true.

The cardinality of one set is much bigger than the cardinality of the other one. Pantone 871 is mapped to #84754e. If you see #84754e and also get the instruction "use only Pantone colors", it is not ambiguous!

Someone needs a lookup table to map those back - that’s what you’re paying for. They aren’t claiming to ‘own’ the colours.

> within-gamut, but

How is this not question-begging?

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