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Comment by iMerNibor | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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