I never thought I'd figure out a way to say that in under 160 characters.
Pantone <noun> [usually as modifier] <trademark> A system for matching colors, used in specifying printing inks: Pantone colors. Etymology: 1960s an invented name.
I never thought I'd figure out a way to say that in under 160 characters.
Pantone <noun> [usually as modifier] <trademark> A system for matching colors, used in specifying printing inks: Pantone colors. Etymology: 1960s an invented name.
r/technology thread
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R' = R/255
G' = G/255
B' = B/255
K = 1-max(R', G', B')
C = (1-R'-K) / (1-K)
M = (1-G'-K) / (1-K)
Y = (1-B'-K) / (1-K)
So in CMKY that's #0454FE
Photoshop and most software that has to print stuff can convert between CMYK and RGB without issue
Those are cool conversion formulas, I should definitely look more into that stuff.
I can’t tell if it’s just linear scaling, or if there’s some fancier stuff (linear fractional (ax+b)/(cx+d) type things). Thinking it’s just linear
CMYK is like the equivalent of RGB for print. Two RGB colors might look different on different monitors depending on calibration and shit, two CMYK colors might look different coming out of different printers depending on even more details than that. Also neither of these standards can cover all the colors that exist, and some can more (Pantone covers more than CMYK, and also metallics and some nonsense like that).
Pantone sells swatch books and a standard for commercial printing systems, and promises that if you use Pantone Dogshit Purple #47 then send it to any commercial printer using their system, the result will look exactly the same as the Pantone Dogshit Purple #47 swatch from the swatch book.
It's a valuable service for people who routinely send stuff to print. But there's no point in using Pantone if you don't have a corresponding swatch book, which they already charge through the nose for.
Oh, it gets better, though. Paper ages and discolors. So your expensive Pantone books effectively have a one year shelf life, before paper discoloration means you can no longer trust it.
Smdh my dick head, subscription books with built in lifetime
who also need colors to be EXACTLY IDENTICAL beyond what anyone would reasonably notice, apparently
seems crazy to me tbh
A lot of this comes from an era where printers were even more dogshit, so your colors can be quite a bit farther off than you might expect. I still see it some in board games, where the colors on the manual and board don't quite match up, sometimes enough to be kind of confusing.
But printers these days are aware that you're designing your stuff on a computer in RGB, and can make a pretty good guess as to what color you actually meant, so it's nowhere near as bad as it was in the 90s.
Isn't the point of Pantone also that the colour is the same across media? A flyer printed with Pantone Dogshit Purple #47 will be the same colour as a plastic widget moulded from Pantone Dogshit Purple #47 plastic or a bucket of Pantone Dogshit Purple #47 paint?
I didn't actually know they covered plastics! That is somewhat more useful.
I know it's used by people who only do print media though, without trying to match multiple formats. It's still how you make sure your flyer looks exactly like you specified.
CMYK is for colour separations when printing and to make it simpler to mix colours to make another colour - like dark red will be made from a duotone of black K and magenta M. Dark blue can be black and cyan. Newspapers use it - if you notice on some pages have solid blocks of colours down one side of a page, those are the CMYK registration.
It is a very good way of saving money - if you push out a thousand ads using only two inks instead of three or four, you don't spend as much on printing costs. In the old days, when I started design work, if the job was CMYK - and they almost always were - the printers would ask for separations for each CMYK value, then when they print they printed each one on top of each other to make the final production. Of course you lose some colour vibrancy, but the skill is getting the mix right and as close to the original as possible.
Now I work in architecture I have to handle NCS and RAL colour conversion setups as well - which also look entirely different on screen, paper, and in real life.