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Can someone tell me what value does Pantone bring to the table? As a man-on-the-street I fail to understand what they are claiming for. Is this about the naming

by dchia 4y ago

Can someone tell me what value does Pantone bring to the table? As a man-on-the-street I fail to understand what they are claiming for. Is this about the naming Pantone has given to a particular Hex Code?

gruez 4y ago
It’s not just the rgb value. Using a specific Pantone color ensures that when you get it printed or manufactured it’s the color that you expect.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  ...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer (by specifying a Pantone color). What this $15 subscription is for is technically just that set of mappings built-in into Photoshop.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    It’s not really, you wouldn’t choose these colors from RGB/CMYK you’d use a sample book. It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team. $15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      > It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    And then you'd probably not get what you expect since your CMYK printer isn't calibrated like the print shop's printer is, despite having the same kind of paint.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      You get what you want, because you use a Pantone color to match it. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. However, for Photoshop specifically, the only use of that information is to display an RGB approximation. (although with uncalibrated printer you'd be screwed one way or another, I guess)
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > ...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer. That’s not going to work, because the natures of the different surface will make a given RGB/CMYK perceptually differ. Think display calibration, except a lot worse. The point of the Pantone system is that they’ve done the legwork to get perceptual matchings across surfaces, and design paint mix recipes to achieve reproducible matching. That’s what you’re paying for.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      Of course it's going to work, it's the exact same thing except you communicate the Pantone color out of band instead of embedding it in PSD metadata.
    - taylodl 4y ago
      This. So much this. The Pantone system covers displays, materials of all types, paper of all types, and fabrics. The same Pantone color will look exactly the same on all those materials. That's why it's the standard and not just for graphic artists, but also for manufacturing, fashion, and other industries I'm probably not even aware of.
    - pxx 4y ago
      It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here. Let's say I want to print something in Pantone 123 (careful, Fluke might go after me!) I send over a design artifact that uses the color #ffc72b. Now, when it comes time for printing, the printer can't print RGB, but I also specify the mapping "#ffc72b is actually Pantone 123". The printer _uses Pantone 123_. We don't suffer any loss of color fidelity. We only use RGB/CMYK as stand-ins for the correct color. Note there are millions (24-bit) or billions (32-bit, but I mean, you can use however many bits you want) of RGB/CMYKs and only thousands of Pantones. This mapping doesn't need to be lossy. Yes, yes, yes, #ffc72b is not Pantone 123. But it _is_ if I say "map everything to the closest Pantone color."
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        >It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here. Considering the part that quotes the original post is missing the whole "Pantone colour" bit, I feel like the post was edited afterwards.
iMerNibor 4y ago
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
- iMerNibor 4y ago
  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
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    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.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      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.
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        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.
TkTech 4y ago
My understanding is that the entire suite of colors is calibrated by material, among other things. #aabbcc on the screen does not look like #aabbcc when painted onto wood, or from plastic injection moulding. But Pantone Color #32 will be absolutely identical everywhere.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- teddyh 4y ago
  It’s worse than that. ‘#aabbcc’ does not exist outside of your screen. ‘#aabbcc’ is not a color. Colors are complicated: https://poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html https://poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html
bitwize 4y ago
PANTONE colors are specific mixes of pigments, not RGB or CMYK values. A PANTONE color includes elements like texture and lustre in its definition that cannot be captured in primary-color systems like RGB or CMYK. Certain trademark shades, like Tiffany blue, are captured as PANTONE colors as well. PANTONE is the standard for print graphic design because a designer will always know exactly how a PANTONE color will look on paper whereas significant calibration is necessary to get a consistent appearance from RGB or CMYK colors.
- robinsonb5 4y ago
  Yes indeed, the lustre makes a huge difference with some colours - sometimes even affecting the perceived hue, not just the vibrance - Pantone 136C vs 136U for example. Same ink, different paper.
chrisseaton 4y ago
By 'hex code' do you mean RGB or CMYK? Pantone encodes more colours than those two.
- pxx 4y ago
  Your last sentence is just wrong. Pantone encodes thousands of colors. RGB/CMYK can encode references to as many (within-gamut, but you can also hack around this) colors as you want, typically millions, often billions. Sure, you might not get Pantone 123 if somebody asks for #ffc72b. But if somebody says "use Pantone colors only" and specifies #ffc72b, you're going to get Pantone 123.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > Your last sentence is just wrong. How do you express metallic gold 817 using RGB. Which of those components gives you how metallic it is? It's not even 1-1 as it depends on the paper used! Their own books show how lossy it is - they show the corresponding CMYK and it often barely matches. > within-gamut Ah so you already knew it wasn't true.
    - pxx 4y ago
      The cardinality of one set is much bigger than the cardinality of the other one. Pantone 871 is mapped to #84754e. If you see #84754e and also get the instruction "use only Pantone colors", it is not ambiguous!
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        Someone needs a lookup table to map those back - that’s what you’re paying for. They aren’t claiming to ‘own’ the colours.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > within-gamut, but How is this not question-begging?
jansan 4y ago
It guarantees that the color will look on a product just like you selected it. In Germany we have an older system called RAL, which is sufficient for most use cases. For example if you ordered a window in RAL 7043 and need to repaint it, you can go to your next hardware store, oder some paint with that color code from any manufacturer, and colors will/should match. But the RAL system applies more or less only to the physical world.
thesuitonym 4y ago
It's very valuable if you're printing a single spot color on something. Instead of doing a cyan pass, a magenta pass, a yellow pass, and a black pass, you can just do a black pass and a pass of your spot color. Despite Pantone being a more expensive ink, you may end up spending less money because it allows you to simply use less ink, and fewer resources. Not to mention when you supply a Pantone color, you will get exactly that color, no matter what print shop you go to (As long as they pay for Pantone inks).
brudgers 4y ago
Pantone brings consistency. If you specify a Pantone color, pay a printer to use the right Pantone inks on the right media (and pay for the level of experience for the printer to do this right), you can get exactly what you expect. By which I mean your company logo will by the right color (assuming your logo was specified as a Pantone color). When printed, of course. The hubub is because the Pantone color pallets have been a convenient way of picking colors for many use cases where consistency doesn't matter enough to pay for Pantone inks and the class of printer who can do them right...which is almost all use cases, everywhere all the time. Pantone created the onscreen colors to facilitate soft proofing. In the small segment of users using them for that, the cost of a license is trivial because clients who require Pantone colors already expect to pay the costs associated with using them.

by dchia 4y ago

gruez 4y ago

It’s not just the rgb value. Using a specific Pantone color ensures that when you get it printed or manufactured it’s the color that you expect.

seba_dos1 4y ago
...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer (by specifying a Pantone color). What this $15 subscription is for is technically just that set of mappings built-in into Photoshop.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  It’s not really, you wouldn’t choose these colors from RGB/CMYK you’d use a sample book. It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team. $15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    > It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  And then you'd probably not get what you expect since your CMYK printer isn't calibrated like the print shop's printer is, despite having the same kind of paint.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    You get what you want, because you use a Pantone color to match it. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. However, for Photoshop specifically, the only use of that information is to display an RGB approximation. (although with uncalibrated printer you'd be screwed one way or another, I guess)
- masklinn 4y ago
  > ...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer. That’s not going to work, because the natures of the different surface will make a given RGB/CMYK perceptually differ. Think display calibration, except a lot worse. The point of the Pantone system is that they’ve done the legwork to get perceptual matchings across surfaces, and design paint mix recipes to achieve reproducible matching. That’s what you’re paying for.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Of course it's going to work, it's the exact same thing except you communicate the Pantone color out of band instead of embedding it in PSD metadata.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    This. So much this. The Pantone system covers displays, materials of all types, paper of all types, and fabrics. The same Pantone color will look exactly the same on all those materials. That's why it's the standard and not just for graphic artists, but also for manufacturing, fashion, and other industries I'm probably not even aware of.
  - pxx 4y ago
    It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here. Let's say I want to print something in Pantone 123 (careful, Fluke might go after me!) I send over a design artifact that uses the color #ffc72b. Now, when it comes time for printing, the printer can't print RGB, but I also specify the mapping "#ffc72b is actually Pantone 123". The printer _uses Pantone 123_. We don't suffer any loss of color fidelity. We only use RGB/CMYK as stand-ins for the correct color. Note there are millions (24-bit) or billions (32-bit, but I mean, you can use however many bits you want) of RGB/CMYKs and only thousands of Pantones. This mapping doesn't need to be lossy. Yes, yes, yes, #ffc72b is not Pantone 123. But it _is_ if I say "map everything to the closest Pantone color."
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      >It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here. Considering the part that quotes the original post is missing the whole "Pantone colour" bit, I feel like the post was edited afterwards.

iMerNibor 4y ago

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

iMerNibor 4y ago
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
- Hamuko 4y ago
  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.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    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.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      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.

TkTech 4y ago

My understanding is that the entire suite of colors is calibrated by material, among other things. #aabbcc on the screen does not look like #aabbcc when painted onto wood, or from plastic injection moulding. But Pantone Color #32 will be absolutely identical everywhere.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
teddyh 4y ago
It’s worse than that. ‘#aabbcc’ does not exist outside of your screen. ‘#aabbcc’ is not a color. Colors are complicated: https://poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html https://poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html

bitwize 4y ago

PANTONE colors are specific mixes of pigments, not RGB or CMYK values. A PANTONE color includes elements like texture and lustre in its definition that cannot be captured in primary-color systems like RGB or CMYK. Certain trademark shades, like Tiffany blue, are captured as PANTONE colors as well. PANTONE is the standard for print graphic design because a designer will always know exactly how a PANTONE color will look on paper whereas significant calibration is necessary to get a consistent appearance from RGB or CMYK colors.

robinsonb5 4y ago
Yes indeed, the lustre makes a huge difference with some colours - sometimes even affecting the perceived hue, not just the vibrance - Pantone 136C vs 136U for example. Same ink, different paper.

chrisseaton 4y ago

By 'hex code' do you mean RGB or CMYK? Pantone encodes more colours than those two.

pxx 4y ago
Your last sentence is just wrong. Pantone encodes thousands of colors. RGB/CMYK can encode references to as many (within-gamut, but you can also hack around this) colors as you want, typically millions, often billions. Sure, you might not get Pantone 123 if somebody asks for #ffc72b. But if somebody says "use Pantone colors only" and specifies #ffc72b, you're going to get Pantone 123.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Your last sentence is just wrong. How do you express metallic gold 817 using RGB. Which of those components gives you how metallic it is? It's not even 1-1 as it depends on the paper used! Their own books show how lossy it is - they show the corresponding CMYK and it often barely matches. > within-gamut Ah so you already knew it wasn't true.
  - pxx 4y ago
    The cardinality of one set is much bigger than the cardinality of the other one. Pantone 871 is mapped to #84754e. If you see #84754e and also get the instruction "use only Pantone colors", it is not ambiguous!
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Someone needs a lookup table to map those back - that’s what you’re paying for. They aren’t claiming to ‘own’ the colours.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > within-gamut, but How is this not question-begging?

jansan 4y ago

It guarantees that the color will look on a product just like you selected it. In Germany we have an older system called RAL, which is sufficient for most use cases. For example if you ordered a window in RAL 7043 and need to repaint it, you can go to your next hardware store, oder some paint with that color code from any manufacturer, and colors will/should match. But the RAL system applies more or less only to the physical world.

thesuitonym 4y ago

It's very valuable if you're printing a single spot color on something. Instead of doing a cyan pass, a magenta pass, a yellow pass, and a black pass, you can just do a black pass and a pass of your spot color. Despite Pantone being a more expensive ink, you may end up spending less money because it allows you to simply use less ink, and fewer resources. Not to mention when you supply a Pantone color, you will get exactly that color, no matter what print shop you go to (As long as they pay for Pantone inks).

brudgers 4y ago

Pantone brings consistency. If you specify a Pantone color, pay a printer to use the right Pantone inks on the right media (and pay for the level of experience for the printer to do this right), you can get exactly what you expect. By which I mean your company logo will by the right color (assuming your logo was specified as a Pantone color). When printed, of course. The hubub is because the Pantone color pallets have been a convenient way of picking colors for many use cases where consistency doesn't matter enough to pay for Pantone inks and the class of printer who can do them right...which is almost all use cases, everywhere all the time. Pantone created the onscreen colors to facilitate soft proofing. In the small segment of users using them for that, the cost of a license is trivial because clients who require Pantone colors already expect to pay the costs associated with using them.