271 years before Pantone, every color imaginable in an 800-page book
thisiscolossal.com
thisiscolossal.com
Pretty much guaranteed by the fact the pages are yellow, presumably paper acidity? When I wrote my thesis, it was supposed to be on acid-free paper and archival, but I snuck in some color printed pictures, and boy did that not work out so well. 20 years later and the pages are yellow and the colors are fading.
> the photos might not be completely color-accurate
It’s hard to imagine how the web version could be accurate at all, I wouldn’t count on it, and none of the blogs nor the book mention their methodology. Even with a lot of knowledge and care, you need to know the illumination conditions (spectra of the lights) and the camera used, and the color space it was encoded into, and your display device has to be calibrated.
The best way to reproduce the colors might be to follow Boogert’s recipes for the paint, which I think is what he documented?
That's back far enough that following the recipes is bound to be _hard_.
Chemicals and pigments and such go by different names, are produced in different processes and formulations, and some are extremely hard to get due to someone noticing that it rots your genes or whatever.
Maybe whatever pigments are used in watercolors aren't affected by this much, but I bet at least some are.
It'd should be fun to try though, for a certain kind of person.
What a strange world.
maybe the interesting aspect is the perseverance of the author and their systematic and thorough approach and their desire to create a complete work over all watercolor pigments?
Is the world better off than if we just eyeballed it?
A Guide to Color from 1692 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628768 - Nov 2022 (3 comments)
A Guide to Color from 1692 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755839 - April 2021 (18 comments)
A colourful book (1692) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702850 - May 2014 (8 comments)
Linus (Tech Tips) made a nice video a few days ago about that.
If Pantone provides no value, just don’t use it. You can still type in any HSV, RGB, etc. you want.
I generally support the business arguments of this issue. The monthly fee seems kind of ridiculous and the work was done a long time ago and was included for free.
But too many times have I seen people warp the truth into a cute sound bite about having to pay to use colours. They’re not colours, they’re mappings.
Pantone isn't selling mappings, they're selling formulas for colors. The reason you're paying for mappings is because they are mappings for workable representations of those formulas for colors.
If you never do anything for print, you don't need spots or Pantone.
The exact opposite, but close enough.
> to also define which RGB values have a corresponding Pantone. Ie. “You can accurately print this number!
This is still backwards. Pantone has not gone through the RGB numbers and figured what inks they could make. Pantone has made inks, and when people need to work on a screen, with projects that will use those inks, they need mappings that will give them a reasonable enough approximation of the colors of those inks to do their jobs. What is printed will not match what is on the screen (irt color.)
> Give the printing apparatus these numbers and they’ll mix the pigments precisely based on formulas they have (and probably also paid for?)
Absolutely. But those numbers will have nothing to do with either RGB or CMYK, other than that approximations of those colors in RGB were used to do the design. Prepress people and designers are composing with RGB, but printing with Pantone. It's as if you composed an orchestra piece on a piano.
Sorry to reiterate this in another thread, but what they want is some money to map the output of a ridiculously challenging chemistry project to some RGB values that will give a vaguely similar impression.
Though that would be failing to leverage dominant market position to extract maximum value. Leaving aside the "nice years of images you'all have there... it would be a shame if..." aspect of current events. To be fair, it's not like some (Si not color) chip makers with dominant position aren't "here's the spec... and if you want to actually use the chip, without massive reverse engineering, ask sales about your support and partnership options". And I suppose there's also "surprise, v2 is discontinued - to adapt your work to v3, contact sales".
I'm exploring emphasizing spectra in K-2 color content, to help disentangle the usual incoherent blur of material properties, physical light, and physiologic color. So I've wondered the last few days if Pantone somehow prevents scanning a chip set and posting spectra. As it might also permit "New Dryadtone(tm pending) Adobe palette to the rescue, now for only $5/mo! With our wonderful Palette Pricing Stability Guarantee!"
You can ignore Pantone entirely, put in whatever color you want, and nobody will know or complain. You can even use any color you want in Photoshop, then make a plate out of it for the press, and tell people the Pantone color you want that plate to be printed with.
But I sense a lot of the self-righteousness about the topic is coming from people who think that Pantone isn't doing anything, that RGB or CMYK can represent every color and Pantone is just selling them back to you. This is not true. Is Photoshop digging into users pockets again with another subscription plan? Yes.
There are other spot color systems such as Toyo, and Focoltone. But at least in the U.S. Pantone is the most common system.
This isn't right. Printing presses don't come with inks, you mix inks and load them onto the press. Printers tend to only have CMYK, and that's also not true for many high end printers, because CMYK is a very restrictive gamut. Hell, the reason for the K is because CMY can't do a good black.
Nearly wrote "Maybe no license fees to map 271 year old color names in Adobe PSD files?" but thought that might be too obscure for HN. Apparently not. :-)
Good education below. To thread's point, in both cases (the watercolors, and Pantone), the work is in determining repeatable formulations, and building/maintaining a reference. It's inane, though, given the rest of ecosystem is licensed, to suddenly charge for the map in a PSD to keep working or go to black.
If one of someone's life's works is very particular, and is further documented in such a detailed way it could only be a personal achievement itself, you've got to figure it's not going to be very common to find someone else who could use the document any time soon.
In this case where each color page may be worth a thousand words or something like that.
They would first have to make it part of their own life's work in pursuit of that subject to begin with.
Which may not be likely to happen during the author's lifetime anyway.
So why would they need more than one copy, especially when reproduction itself could be a much more unlikely hurdle to overcome compared to manuscripting?
These are the types of books most all of which are usually lost.
Leaving us with the slim pickings we have today. If only there were better preservation & archiving over the millennia.
Naturally the fewer the copies, and the less-rapid international communication at the time, the more centuries you would expect it to take before advanced people like that or their reference document gain some kind of worldwide recognition.
https://bibliotheque-numerique.citedulivre-aix.com/viewer/35...