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bradland t1_j1xl21s wrote

Most printed material you see uses something called “four color process” printing. Four ink colors — cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — are printed in tiny dots of varying sizes in order to create the colors you see. If you examine some junk mail or photos in a textbook very closely, you’ll see these tiny dots.

These tiny dots are placed onto the paper by separate cyan, magenta, yellow, and black print mechanisms. That’s why ink jet printers have a black cartridge and a CMY cartridge. Some even have separate C, M, and Y cartridges. The same for laser printers. In commercial printing, there are separate ink wells and printing “plates” for each color.

Pantone colors are pre-mixed inks. Instead of printing individual dots of each color component, the ink pigments are pre-mixed and applied as the final color. This method gives you much better control over the final color, and it allows you to completely cover the paper with ink. Using the dots in four color process, you can only put down so much color before your start to get muddy colors.

This color palette limitation of the four color process (CMYK) is called a color space. The color space Tells you all the possible colors you can create using a particular color process. In print, we deal with the limitations of the CMYK color space. On screen, we deal with the limitations of the RGB color space. The RGB color space is larger than the CMYK color space, but by pre-mixing ink pigments, you can expand beyond the traditional CMYK color space.

Pantone also puts a lot of work into building color palettes that are consistent between CMYK, RGB, and pre-mixed Pantone colors. We take color consistency for granted. Matching a red on screen, in print, and in a fabric is incredibly difficult. Pantone let’s you pick a specific red color out of a color book, then provides ink formulas to accurately reproduce that red anywhere.

This is why Pantone is so popular with designers. It’s a tool that solves an incredibly common problem: color matching.

So many Pantone colors do have RGB counterparts, but Pantone “owns” the mapping of Pantone color to RGB. Adobe can’t use these mappings without paying for a license. What’s crazy is that this system has been around for decades. For as long as there have been digital publishing tools, software publishers have been buying licenses. It’s really remarkable that things have broken down to this point. Pantone is central to a very large part of the design industry across many types of media.

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ExternalUserError OP t1_j1ymf4r wrote

Interesting. Knowing about that mapping is what I was missing. And so these Photoshop files (PSD) have the Pantone colors in the file data, not just the RGB values? So then when you display the file, it has to map to the color system the computer users? Is that accurate?

At this point, do you expect an "open standard" to replace Pantone or is there just too much investment?

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bradland t1_j1yzgy0 wrote

>And so these Photoshop files (PSD) have the Pantone colors in the file data, not just the RGB values?

Yes. For example, if you used Pantone 289 (a dark blue) in your file, Photoshop embeds that color as a separate color “channel” in the file.

>So then when you display the file, it has to map to the color system the computer users? Is that accurate?

Also correct. The PMS 289 blue has a corresponding RGB (almost all computer displays use red, green, and blue pixels) color “break”. The “break” tells the computer what color components most closely match PMS 289.

>At this point, do you expect an "open standard" to replace Pantone or is there just too much investment?

That’s a really tough question. Businesses have been using and paying for Pantone for literal decades. There is a ton of work involved in making colors match across screen, print, textiles, paint, apparel, cosmetics, and architectural (and I’m sure more). Replacing that would take a tremendous amount of work. There are open alternatives, but they don’t have the breadth of industry solutions that Pantone does. The ability to pick a color and have it look the same on screen, in print, and on a dress isn’t easily replicated.

IMO, Adobe and Pantone will solve this stalemate, or businesses will get used to paying for Pantone directly. Small users who’s don’t want to pay will simply get by with “close enough” or alternatives that only work for screen and print, which is the most common use case by far.

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