7 ms·

This is not about the colors, FYI. This is about someone referencing a specific Pantone product as a spot color. And the automatic conversion from that spot col

This is not about the colors, FYI. This is about someone referencing a specific Pantone product as a spot color. And the automatic conversion from that spot color name to the regular RGB / CMYK color values is now gone. But if you embedded the actual RGB/CMYK values into your file, then it'll still open just fine and display those colors just fine. Edit: Also, converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think. If I reference a Pantone product, that pretty much covers all properties of the printed surface, including things like reflectivity angles, fluorescence and phosphorescence. A cheap xRite will already measure reflectivity in 13 wavelength bands. And then it'll average those 13 characteristics into 3 RGB numbers. Professional color measurement tools can have hundreds of properties per ink type, thereby making reduction to 3 values even more lossy. If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light. If I give you a Pantone ID, you also now how it'll look from the side or under UV light. RGB specifies an averaged wavelength mixture, Pantone specifies a chemical ink mixture. Edit2: You know these car paints that have fresnel reflections, meaning they appear to have a different color of you look at them from a different angle? That's an excellent example of a case where you need to specify a specific ink type like Pantone, because the RGB value changes based on the viewing angle.

mavhc 4y ago
Is there a more advanced standard colourspace that we could be using?
- exo762 4y ago
  Just guessing, but that seems to imply two possibilities. One containing colors that can't be implemented - no such pigments / ink / chemicals exist. And other one describing actual inks and their behavior - which sounds like what Pantone is doing.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    I think I'd start with: a list of how much of each range of frequencies of light are reflected, a list of light that's emitted, how matte/mirrored the surface is
  - brudgers 4y ago
    Yes, Pantone describes inks using samples of actual products because it is in the business of selling ink. Familiarity is the big design advantage of Pantone color. I look at the samples, pick a color, and that’s what I will get. Whether or not my monitor is calibrated or whether or not I am using a computer at all. From a business perspective, if you’re logo is Reflex Blue, then any reputable print shop can print your leave-behinds and any decent sign shop can make your tradeshow display.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  There are wide color gamut RGB spaces such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPhoto_RGB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPhoto_RGB_color_space that do a better job of modelling many forms of color vision than conventional RGB spaces. The response of the eye under ordinary situations is modeled well with three stimulus values, but real colors are on a spectrum. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D which uses a total of six colors and high precision filters such that there is a red that passes the left filter and a red that passes the right filter. The two reds look almost the same without the filters, but with the filters one becomes completely invisible. In situations where light is interacting with something other than your eye (filters, a prism) the physics become vastly more complex. Speaking of 3D images lately I've been frustrated with wide gamut displays because I make images that are viewed through these glasses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D Namely the red channel goes to the left eye and the green and blue go to the left eye. (0, 180, 0) in sRGB is converted by the application (Photoshop, Web Browser) to something like (16, 176, 15) before sending to a wide gamut model. Adding a little bit of red and blue to the wide gamut green makes it look less saturated and more like the sRGB green, but it's bad for anaglyph stereograms because the extra red light causes an unwanted ghost image to appear in the wrong channel.
- patmorgan23 4y ago
  I think it's less about 'color space' and more about modeling material properties.
- acomms 4y ago
  This is about "printing" isn't it? I guess 3D modelling should have spectral qualities - but Pantone is made for spot colouring in print and paint.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Except the parent talked about reflections and other frequencies of light. Do we need a next gen colourspace (materialspace?)
  - BashiBazouk 4y ago
    It use to be and still is to a certain degree but Pantone has been trying to move digital and make consistent colors when printing 4 color. All the old books have ink formulas for spot colors which have limited uses these days. The new books ditch the formulas and give RGB, CMYK and html for each swatch.
FridgeSeal 4y ago
This is so fascinating to learn. Here is was just thinking Pantone colours were some fancy standardised names… Also, TIL “fresnel” is the name for that colour/pattern!
- laserlight 4y ago
  I'm not sure fresnel is the right term. What GP referred to is probably iridescence [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence
  - mcdonje 4y ago
    Yeah, he didn't call the color effect fresnel. He called the reflections fresnel. You're right that the color effect is called iridescence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
  - hrnnnnnn 4y ago
    If you want to know lots about how materials interact with light to look the way they do, including how the Fresnel effect contributes, there was a great talk at the Blender conference this morning about it. https://youtu.be/DQeP363Xmn4 https://youtu.be/DQeP363Xmn4
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  The fresnel lens/effect is used in a number of places - Those "invisibility shields" you see videos of - In (vision) glasses, to correct for double vision (you can get prism in the glasses or, if the double vision is too much for that, a sticky "fresnel" lens that gets attached to the glass. I have one setting on my desk that I was using before my corrective surgery, actually... woo, tangents)
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Augustin-Jean Fresnel was an engineer and physicist who made major contributions to the field of optics. As a result, many different things are named after him. I am more familiar with "Fresnel" being a shading technique responsible for "rim lighting" in computer graphics, that's because this is an application of Fresnel equations, discovered by Fresnel. But in other fields, "Fresnel" can mean something else entirely, with the only thing in common being that it can be traced back to the work of Fresnel.
dzdt 4y ago
Is there any more open standard than Pantone that expresses color properties across viewing angles/lighting conditions? Like in the 3d digital modelling space maybe?
- account42 4y ago
  The term for that is a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). No idea about libraries of BRDFs for common materials but considering how even games have moved to physically-based rendering there must be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_distribution_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
  - bogwog 4y ago
    The original PBR paper cites a materials database made by one of those big Japanese companies many years ago (I think it was Mitsubishi?) EDIT: found it! It’s called MERL (https://merl.com/brdf https://merl.com/brdf) Modern PBR specifically doesn’t really rely on artists choosing a BRDF though. The idea is to pick one that’s accurate, and expose a handful of variables to control it (roughness and metalness mostly)
- brudgers 4y ago
  I don’t know if one exists. But if it does, I am not sure how useful it would be because the effort to get an ink/paint that met all those requirements would be at least as complex as the Pantone factory. Probably more complex since Pantone designs colors for the production facilities they have in existence (or can procure). Basically the problem is who will make the color you specified? There are problems with Pantone, but availability is not ordinarily among them.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    There is no "open source" because it is a shitton of work someone has to pay for it and actively manage, and open source means anyone else could just take your income source (selling the paint catalogs) and re-make it cheaper. If you're buying a lot you can just design the color, get a bunch of samples mixed and pick one. Hell, you could go to good paint shop and get anything you want matched and get a recipe for it, that's how car can be painted to match the paint that changed the color with age. Just costly for anything not mass market.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fortran77 4y ago
This is the real story behind Pantone colors. I've blocked / downvoted all those "experts" on twitter who are saying "here's a chart of hex equivalents."
- pavlov 4y ago
  Is there a downvote button on Twitter nowadays? (Serious question, I've given up on the platform — just curious to know if they've changed it)
  - lillywastaken 4y ago
    Yes, but only for replies.
- acomms 4y ago
  I don't understand - in lieu of paying for a Pantone subscription, isn't the next best option to use RGB and just separately log what the final printed spot Pantone will be? Maybe I misunderstand why you dislike the hex equivalents chart.
  - dangerface 4y ago
    RGB is used for describing the colour of light if you are a web developer like me you will never need anything else. CMYK is used for printed colours that reflect light and as such there isn't a direct correlation between them. For example RGB blue #0000ff is so bright it can not be printed, if you tried it would look a lot darker blue than the screen shows. This issue with printed colours looking different from screen space colours is that printed colours will also look different depending on the surface they are printed onto and a variety of other variable. Your work around is fine for me as I work in RGB and would really only need the Pantone when im printing once every 5 years? If you are a print designer then you will be using the colours all day every day and having to switch or a reference that isn't exact results in expensive printing mistakes.
  - mceachen 4y ago
    People saying “just convert to RGB” are kinda missing the point. RGB can’t be used for printing-typically you’ll send CMYK separations. Unfortunately, the color gamut of CMYK is quite limited. If you have a print job that requires a very specific color, say, for your logo, it can be cheaper to order a black and spot color print run. If the color is out of gamut, you have to provide a spot color. That spot color, at least in the US, was always specified in PANTONE.
code_duck 4y ago
But how does the chemical ink mixture and angle viewing translate into colors on a monitor?
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  By having a mapping to RGB values and a calibrated monitor. This of course then only gives an approximation. However this isn't typically used for digital output, but the pantone ID is carried along so that when printing (or otherwise producing) the physical object the correct color and material is being used. (And some 3D rendering/CAD tool might also deal with reflections etc. in digital space)
  - code_duck 4y ago
    Oh, that makes sense. The intended final output is not on a monitor.
- ilyt 4y ago
  The answer is not very well. You get best estimate, make your pics, get it printed and then actually see it.
scarface74 4y ago
Thanks for the explanation, of course the internet likes to simplify things to generate nerd outrage.
mindslight 4y ago
> If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light Not exactly. What primaries? What gamma? What max intensity? Sure, many of these things have generally accepted defaults. But point being it's still not that simple. But really, RGB only seems exact because it produces one specific color on the monitor in front of you. And it's nowhere close to being able to represent the full gamut of possible colors. For example, it's missing all violets!
technogeek00 4y ago
Having worked with colors and system conversions a lot, deeply appreciate the technical detail here. Cheers!
funwithstuff 4y ago
I posted the original tweet. The problem is with a spot color channel, which I created in the first place by picking a color name from a color book 20 years ago. Now, the on-screen color (PANTONE 130 CVC, an old color name) goes black in Photoshop 2023, but is still a recognisable yellow in an older Photoshop 2022. Without the screen reference, you don't know what it's supposed to look like, so designers working with multiple spot colors could have a tricky time. More info in this video: https://youtu.be/OBs2-2KcN-w https://youtu.be/OBs2-2KcN-w
aasasd 4y ago
> converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think From what I briefly read, a large chunk of Pantone doesn't even fit in CMYK: > About 30% of the Pantone system's 1114 spot colors (as of year 2000) cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified amounts. These 1114 spot colors are apparently themselves only a part of the total 2161, but still it's 400 colors missing, seemingly without even accounting for texture effects and whatnot.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  CMYK is not a colorspace.
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  Pantone prints "bridge decks", with the true spot colors printed right next to their CMYK best equivalent. If you've ever seen one, you might well conclude that almost none of the Pantone spot colors are representable in CMYK. It's not great!
- aasasd 4y ago
  (I only now noticed the “as of year 2000” next to the ‘1114’—while the number 2161 is from 2019. So presumably the number of un-representable colors grew in the meanwhile, and might be about 650 now if the proportion is the same.) Also, personally I find that I'd like to have some kind of printed swatches just so I can figure out the color of my stuff at home and find the corresponding paint, sealant or whatever. I could just pirate Pantone and print some of it for like twenty bucks—however, if a third of it is outside CMYK, then I'm rather out of luck. Bit of a weird problem to have.

mavhc 4y ago

Is there a more advanced standard colourspace that we could be using?

exo762 4y ago
Just guessing, but that seems to imply two possibilities. One containing colors that can't be implemented - no such pigments / ink / chemicals exist. And other one describing actual inks and their behavior - which sounds like what Pantone is doing.
- mavhc 4y ago
  I think I'd start with: a list of how much of each range of frequencies of light are reflected, a list of light that's emitted, how matte/mirrored the surface is
- brudgers 4y ago
  Yes, Pantone describes inks using samples of actual products because it is in the business of selling ink. Familiarity is the big design advantage of Pantone color. I look at the samples, pick a color, and that’s what I will get. Whether or not my monitor is calibrated or whether or not I am using a computer at all. From a business perspective, if you’re logo is Reflex Blue, then any reputable print shop can print your leave-behinds and any decent sign shop can make your tradeshow display.
PaulHoule 4y ago
There are wide color gamut RGB spaces such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPhoto_RGB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPhoto_RGB_color_space that do a better job of modelling many forms of color vision than conventional RGB spaces. The response of the eye under ordinary situations is modeled well with three stimulus values, but real colors are on a spectrum. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D which uses a total of six colors and high precision filters such that there is a red that passes the left filter and a red that passes the right filter. The two reds look almost the same without the filters, but with the filters one becomes completely invisible. In situations where light is interacting with something other than your eye (filters, a prism) the physics become vastly more complex. Speaking of 3D images lately I've been frustrated with wide gamut displays because I make images that are viewed through these glasses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D Namely the red channel goes to the left eye and the green and blue go to the left eye. (0, 180, 0) in sRGB is converted by the application (Photoshop, Web Browser) to something like (16, 176, 15) before sending to a wide gamut model. Adding a little bit of red and blue to the wide gamut green makes it look less saturated and more like the sRGB green, but it's bad for anaglyph stereograms because the extra red light causes an unwanted ghost image to appear in the wrong channel.
patmorgan23 4y ago
I think it's less about 'color space' and more about modeling material properties.
acomms 4y ago
This is about "printing" isn't it? I guess 3D modelling should have spectral qualities - but Pantone is made for spot colouring in print and paint.
- mavhc 4y ago
  Except the parent talked about reflections and other frequencies of light. Do we need a next gen colourspace (materialspace?)
- BashiBazouk 4y ago
  It use to be and still is to a certain degree but Pantone has been trying to move digital and make consistent colors when printing 4 color. All the old books have ink formulas for spot colors which have limited uses these days. The new books ditch the formulas and give RGB, CMYK and html for each swatch.

FridgeSeal 4y ago

This is so fascinating to learn. Here is was just thinking Pantone colours were some fancy standardised names… Also, TIL “fresnel” is the name for that colour/pattern!

laserlight 4y ago
I'm not sure fresnel is the right term. What GP referred to is probably iridescence [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridescence
- mcdonje 4y ago
  Yeah, he didn't call the color effect fresnel. He called the reflections fresnel. You're right that the color effect is called iridescence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
- hrnnnnnn 4y ago
  If you want to know lots about how materials interact with light to look the way they do, including how the Fresnel effect contributes, there was a great talk at the Blender conference this morning about it. https://youtu.be/DQeP363Xmn4 https://youtu.be/DQeP363Xmn4
RHSeeger 4y ago
The fresnel lens/effect is used in a number of places - Those "invisibility shields" you see videos of - In (vision) glasses, to correct for double vision (you can get prism in the glasses or, if the double vision is too much for that, a sticky "fresnel" lens that gets attached to the glass. I have one setting on my desk that I was using before my corrective surgery, actually... woo, tangents)
GuB-42 4y ago
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was an engineer and physicist who made major contributions to the field of optics. As a result, many different things are named after him. I am more familiar with "Fresnel" being a shading technique responsible for "rim lighting" in computer graphics, that's because this is an application of Fresnel equations, discovered by Fresnel. But in other fields, "Fresnel" can mean something else entirely, with the only thing in common being that it can be traced back to the work of Fresnel.

dzdt 4y ago

Is there any more open standard than Pantone that expresses color properties across viewing angles/lighting conditions? Like in the 3d digital modelling space maybe?

account42 4y ago
The term for that is a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). No idea about libraries of BRDFs for common materials but considering how even games have moved to physically-based rendering there must be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_distribution_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
- bogwog 4y ago
  The original PBR paper cites a materials database made by one of those big Japanese companies many years ago (I think it was Mitsubishi?) EDIT: found it! It’s called MERL (https://merl.com/brdf https://merl.com/brdf) Modern PBR specifically doesn’t really rely on artists choosing a BRDF though. The idea is to pick one that’s accurate, and expose a handful of variables to control it (roughness and metalness mostly)
brudgers 4y ago
I don’t know if one exists. But if it does, I am not sure how useful it would be because the effort to get an ink/paint that met all those requirements would be at least as complex as the Pantone factory. Probably more complex since Pantone designs colors for the production facilities they have in existence (or can procure). Basically the problem is who will make the color you specified? There are problems with Pantone, but availability is not ordinarily among them.
- ilyt 4y ago
  There is no "open source" because it is a shitton of work someone has to pay for it and actively manage, and open source means anyone else could just take your income source (selling the paint catalogs) and re-make it cheaper. If you're buying a lot you can just design the color, get a bunch of samples mixed and pick one. Hell, you could go to good paint shop and get anything you want matched and get a recipe for it, that's how car can be painted to match the paint that changed the color with age. Just costly for anything not mass market.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fortran77 4y ago

This is the real story behind Pantone colors. I've blocked / downvoted all those "experts" on twitter who are saying "here's a chart of hex equivalents."

pavlov 4y ago
Is there a downvote button on Twitter nowadays? (Serious question, I've given up on the platform — just curious to know if they've changed it)
- lillywastaken 4y ago
  Yes, but only for replies.
acomms 4y ago
I don't understand - in lieu of paying for a Pantone subscription, isn't the next best option to use RGB and just separately log what the final printed spot Pantone will be? Maybe I misunderstand why you dislike the hex equivalents chart.
- dangerface 4y ago
  RGB is used for describing the colour of light if you are a web developer like me you will never need anything else. CMYK is used for printed colours that reflect light and as such there isn't a direct correlation between them. For example RGB blue #0000ff is so bright it can not be printed, if you tried it would look a lot darker blue than the screen shows. This issue with printed colours looking different from screen space colours is that printed colours will also look different depending on the surface they are printed onto and a variety of other variable. Your work around is fine for me as I work in RGB and would really only need the Pantone when im printing once every 5 years? If you are a print designer then you will be using the colours all day every day and having to switch or a reference that isn't exact results in expensive printing mistakes.
- mceachen 4y ago
  People saying “just convert to RGB” are kinda missing the point. RGB can’t be used for printing-typically you’ll send CMYK separations. Unfortunately, the color gamut of CMYK is quite limited. If you have a print job that requires a very specific color, say, for your logo, it can be cheaper to order a black and spot color print run. If the color is out of gamut, you have to provide a spot color. That spot color, at least in the US, was always specified in PANTONE.

code_duck 4y ago

But how does the chemical ink mixture and angle viewing translate into colors on a monitor?

johannes1234321 4y ago
By having a mapping to RGB values and a calibrated monitor. This of course then only gives an approximation. However this isn't typically used for digital output, but the pantone ID is carried along so that when printing (or otherwise producing) the physical object the correct color and material is being used. (And some 3D rendering/CAD tool might also deal with reflections etc. in digital space)
- code_duck 4y ago
  Oh, that makes sense. The intended final output is not on a monitor.
ilyt 4y ago
The answer is not very well. You get best estimate, make your pics, get it printed and then actually see it.

scarface74 4y ago

Thanks for the explanation, of course the internet likes to simplify things to generate nerd outrage.

mindslight 4y ago

> If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light Not exactly. What primaries? What gamma? What max intensity? Sure, many of these things have generally accepted defaults. But point being it's still not that simple. But really, RGB only seems exact because it produces one specific color on the monitor in front of you. And it's nowhere close to being able to represent the full gamut of possible colors. For example, it's missing all violets!

technogeek00 4y ago

Having worked with colors and system conversions a lot, deeply appreciate the technical detail here. Cheers!

funwithstuff 4y ago

I posted the original tweet. The problem is with a spot color channel, which I created in the first place by picking a color name from a color book 20 years ago. Now, the on-screen color (PANTONE 130 CVC, an old color name) goes black in Photoshop 2023, but is still a recognisable yellow in an older Photoshop 2022. Without the screen reference, you don't know what it's supposed to look like, so designers working with multiple spot colors could have a tricky time. More info in this video: https://youtu.be/OBs2-2KcN-w https://youtu.be/OBs2-2KcN-w

aasasd 4y ago

> converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think From what I briefly read, a large chunk of Pantone doesn't even fit in CMYK: > About 30% of the Pantone system's 1114 spot colors (as of year 2000) cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified amounts. These 1114 spot colors are apparently themselves only a part of the total 2161, but still it's 400 colors missing, seemingly without even accounting for texture effects and whatnot.

systemvoltage 4y ago
CMYK is not a colorspace.
exmadscientist 4y ago
Pantone prints "bridge decks", with the true spot colors printed right next to their CMYK best equivalent. If you've ever seen one, you might well conclude that almost none of the Pantone spot colors are representable in CMYK. It's not great!
aasasd 4y ago
(I only now noticed the “as of year 2000” next to the ‘1114’—while the number 2161 is from 2019. So presumably the number of un-representable colors grew in the meanwhile, and might be about 650 now if the proportion is the same.) Also, personally I find that I'd like to have some kind of printed swatches just so I can figure out the color of my stuff at home and find the corresponding paint, sealant or whatever. I could just pirate Pantone and print some of it for like twenty bucks—however, if a third of it is outside CMYK, then I'm rather out of luck. Bit of a weird problem to have.