>Would you look at Pantone swatches to see what the "real" color will look like, then look at the Photoshop version and imagine what the final result will look like with the real Pantone color?

This, and spending a lot of time colour calibrating the monitor to actual colours. Apple monitors and lcd screens were great as they could be colour calibrated easily.

Basically all of the above/whatever you have access to.

For production runs, ordering proofs of your work is very important before they run too many. You can make adjustments in a lot of different ways. But pantone is REALLY helpful so you and the printers have the same reference point for a color (theoretically).

I love this stuff, if you have any questions I'll ramble on about print production.

> How does a graphic designer work with colors in Photoshop, knowing that many colors can't be accurately represented in RGB on their computer monitor?

First off, Photoshop itself has some tools. You can configure your color spaces while working. Photoshop will then highlight unprintable colors when they're out of gamut. It can also highlight colors that will exist in print but can't be displayed on your monitor.

Other than that, print shops use boxes and books full of printed color reference cards.

If you aren't color matching a reference system like Pantone but are instead trying to see exactly how the final print will look, shops will print out a bunch of their own reference cards and chips on the papers, cardstock, vinyl, polyester, or whatever it is they'll be printing on.

And it isn't enough to just have one and keep it forever. Papers fade and discolor, inks fade and discolor, so the colors can drift away in unacceptable ways after two or three years. Bigger print studios will budget a few thousand dollars each year to continuously update their reference colors.

Every blend ends up being slightly different. Printing a specific CYMK on one brand of cardstock will have different appearance than that same CYMK on a different brand of cardstock. Printing on glossy paper will look different from matte paper. Printing on paper versus printing on vinyl will look different. Each one will be similar, and some will be nearly identical, but visually each will still be different.

That's part of the appeal of Pantone, the print shop is supposed to account for it and fine tune for whatever inks, dyes, and media they're using so it produces a match. If someone is expecting P15-5519, but it happens that the specific paper happens to make the print a slightly greener turquoise, the shop is supposed to adjust the color mix so it matches the reference color instead of matching a specific CYMK blend. If this combination happens to need a little more black or a little less yellow, they'll adjust the CYMK to whatever it needs to be in order to visually produce the Pantone color P15-5519.

Getting the colors to match exactly is one of the reasons for proofs before a big print run, you want to verify with the customer that they're satisfied before running the full batch. It isn't just for issues like spelling and placement (although those are part of it), it's also to ensure the color is precisely what they expect on the various media used.

I can’t speak for others, but I’ve found color calibrating my monitors to be a chore and not entirely accurate. So I just work in a CMYK color space in photoshop, Illustrator, and/or InDesign, get things roughly how I want, print a sample, adjust, print, etc, until the color is to my liking.

Different printers will also represent colors differently, so I either need to print on the same type I’ll eventually have the job printed off of, or understand how they treat the colors differently so I know roughly how it will change. That’s also a reason I keep multiple printers around.

Lastly, if I’m designing for screen only, I’ll just use an RGB color space and check it on multiple devices/monitors to ensure it looks good everywhere. That often means compromising on the exact color, but the goal is to make something pleasing for as many use cases as possible.

I don't know the answers to these questions. I'm not a professional graphic designer. I do know that Photoshop and other tools support working in different color spaces, wider than those that can be displayed on the web (which uses sRGB as a standard, covering only about a third of human color vision). Some very high-quality monitors support a very wide gamut of colors, and I would assume (but don't know) that those are used for exceptionally high-fidelity graphic design work.

I do the first and last one usually. If the project is given the time and resources that it needs, you'll usually order lots of test prints and make corrections as needed. But it can be a huge pain in the ass.

In addition to what everyone else has said,

>Or do you print . . . in order to see what it will look like and adjust?

Many printing/publishing companies have special laser or inkjet printers that have been specially calibrated using a standard called SWOP (Specification for Web Offset Publications; not "Web" here refers to web press printing not the world wide web) to closely mimick what something will look like on the industrial scale printing presses. In the early days of my publishing career, I worked on paper page proofs made by a normal mediocre quality office printer and also got a stack of high quality SWOP proofs just of the art.

But the person working on the colours needs a reference or they are just sending bad data to the manufacturers

Having a widely supported standard is important.

Pantone is that standard, they have basically a monopoly on professional colour definitions. Everyone competent who is using colour professionally will understand a Pantone colour. Designers have lots of existing designs using Pantone colours. Manufacturers know how to produce all kinds of plastics, fabrics, paints, or anything else, to whatever Pantone colour you want.

Introducing a new standard would be very hard. All designs would need updating. All manufacturers would have to invest extra money in supporting it. Someone will have to produce the definitive colour samples that define the colours, and designers and manufacturers would have to buy them.

And there is little incentive for anyone to invest that time and money. The designers will still need Pantone to deal with the vast majority of manufacturers. The manufacturers will still need Pantone to deal with the vast majority of designers. It's extra cost for no benefit.

I don't know the answer to these questions, either. My best guess to the last one is "substantial but not totally prohibitive", but I don't know.

It does in terms of representing the colors humans can see, but you still need to be able to produce those colors in a range of different media.

It's just pan- (Greek for "all" or "everywhere") + tone (as in, shade of color). Seems like a good name for a universal color-matching system.

> These are the colors our eyes see.

No, they aren't.

The three cones in your eyes respond most strongly to deep blue-violet, green, and yellow-green. But they see a distribution of colors around those peaks.

What you're getting at here is the idea that color is about tristimulus values, not the spectral power distribution. And that's true, at least under the assumption of humans with normal color vision.

But red, green, and blue light are not the tristimulus values, and don't cover all possible stimulus values that can be produced by a spectral distribution.

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Read the sidebar.

“Pantone is a company that tries to make sure that purple markers are the same color as purple crayons. They do other stuff too like t shirts, dresses, or even toys. That way everything matches and looks pretty”. There you go.