Except, they generally use it derogatorily, or as if it is some sort of "gotcha." As if the Christian symbolism is somehow inauthentic while the Druid symbolism, for example, is somehow authentic. Which is wrong. These things have evolved dozens of times and go right back to pre-history. Nobody stole it from anyone else, and no one's interpretation is inauthentic.

>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.

Color consistency on most systems is barely a priority. Home screens and printers vary wildly

RGB is only for illuminated displays and even that has some pretty wild variations as most screens are not calibrated and don't even try for perfect color consistency. Your average LED/LCD screen is TFT and color accuracy isn't even a priority. Higher end screens are IPS which is at least consistent with colors across itself, you can then get ones that are calibrated to get a consistent view of the colors between computer screens

Pantone isn't for display colors, its for print colors. Most printers are CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) but again there are calibration differences. For general use the CMYK values are close enough. If you want to make 50,000,000 of something at 8 different vendors and have them all look the same you'd need to have some way to specify colors and calibrations beyond just CMYK because that doesn't adjust for if printer A is inherently a bit Cyan heavy in its prints

That's where Pantone comes in. If you specify Pantone Red 032 and everyone has a Pantone calibrated printer and their booklet of reference swatches then all of them will come out looking exactly the same despite using different equipment

What I'm saying is, that's what people mean. That's what they're getting at. They're saying it isn't a Christianity-specific thing like a nativity display is. That is unabashedly Christian.

But instead of writing two paragraphs about the meaning of cultural continuity, they use a shortcut they saw other people use: "it's really just a pagan tradition".

In Christian usage, "pagan" meant "whatever the people who aren't Christians yet are doing".

The ability of different monitors to display the same thing in RGB as might be printed in CMYK is down to the ICC profile, not Pantone. PMS just provides the color references, it is the job of the printer company, display manufacturer, etc, to ensure appropriate mapping of the gamuts.

We can say that there has been cultural continuity; that the Christmas season celebrations are obviously descendants of the feasting and drinking that was done by pre-Christian people during the darkest time of the year... because we are their descendants. Cultures rarely get immediately shorn of certain elements or immediately take them up.

The holly plant has been used by Romans, druids, Norse... people all the way back into pre-history. It was reinterpreted as a Christian decoration with Christian symbolism by Christian converts. Druids thought that holly would protect a home from natural disasters. Christians don't believe that but have used holly to represent Jesus' crown of thorns. That's just cultural evolution.

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.

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.

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Pantone colors are one level removed from the RGB representation of those colors which allows the application to adjust the RGB values to best represent the correct shade to compensate for differences in specific computer monitors. To get the most accurate representations the monitor will need to be calibrated using a feedback loop (a camera) that feeds back the color produced for a specific input value to get the closest representable version of each Pantone color.

When fully calibrated a print that uses Pantone should look as nearly as possible like a faithful copy of the image as presented in Photoshop. Colors that are represented in RGB will have some reciprocity errors in the translation to CMYK (or whatever standard the chosen printer uses)

Also, another question: what is your opinion on Freetone and http://adaptstudio.ca/ocs/ and other potential alternatives to Pantone?

Are they inferior in any significant way, or is it purely a question of Pantone's ubiquity and the difficulty of switching?

How much time/effort would it take to switch an existing project from Pantone to some other system?

I mean personally I think "pagan" is a wildly misapplied word, but I think people mean "it's a cultural thing from prior to the time of Christianization". So the question is basically, is the use of holly and other greenery around this time of year something that is specifically supposed to represent a biblical thing? Or is it something people were already doing and it just got coincidentally associated with Christmas due to the timing?

And I think you'd agree the latter is accurate. And that's what people are trying to get at when they say "it's a pagan thing" even though it might not be related to any religious practice.

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?

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? Basically is it mostly in your mind and your ability to imagine what the abstract digital art would look like when finally realized?

Or do you use software to try to model the resulting material and render it under different lighting conditions?

Or do you print or order samples of the target media in the correct colors in order to see what it will look like and adjust?

Or something else entirely?

It's impossible to know. There's nothing "pagan" about decorating with greenery in the winter. It's like saying that using potpourri is pagan because ancient people used bowls of fragrant plants in their houses and temples too.

Red was a pretty common color for Santa/Father Christmas to wear long before Coca Cola even existed. Check out this version Santa Claus, really pretty similar to the modern version, published 24 years before the Coca Cola company was founded.

As the various visual concepts of Santa Claus/St. Nicholas/Father Christmas coalesced into a single character, those ads probably helped push the needle towards red becoming the only color he ever wears, but the concept had already been kicking around in the public consciousness for centuries, and there's no reason why it couldn't have ended up settling on an image pretty similar to what we have now without the help of Coca Cola's commercials.

That thread specifically acknowledges that the use of greenery predates the more modern customs and is the one thing that could, reasonably, be described as being of older pagan origin.

No. Pantone is not just a subtractive color system.

Well, one, not everything can be represented by RGB. The RGB color gamut (the colors you can produce by mixing pure red, green, and blue) does not even close to cover all possible colors. There are many colors, particularly the richer shades of teal, green, and greenish-blue, that can't be displayed that way. More generally, no finite set of primary colors can produce every chromaticity (combination of hue, which is what 'type' of color it is, and saturation, which is how intensely colored). Such a finite set would produce some straight-sided polygon in the space of possible colors, which can't represent the smoothly curved available space (and, in practice, such a set would also require maximally saturated colors, which real dyes and the like don't produce).

For two, since different purposes use different mixes of pigments, the spaces each thing can cover vary. Your printer colors, for example, don't align with the colors your monitor can produce, because printers are using subtractive primaries (which absorb light) rather than glowing colors in the monitor (which add light). One common color space for printers is CMYK (for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key [i.e., black, used to darken colors]), and you can see that CMYK and sRGB have different available colors.

And for three, different monitors and other forms of display show things differently. If you want to be able to design a shirt on your computer, then reproduce it in fabric dyes, you need to understand the relationship between those two color systems.

Which brings us to pantone. Pantones don't actually represent any specific mix of pigments, like RGB or CMYK. Instead, they represent an abstract idea of a color that can be consistently represented across different methods of displaying one. Each pantone has representations in RGB or CMYK or whatever else, provided that the color it represents is inside their gamuts, but the pantone is independent of those specific representations.

It's kind of like the idea of the number two existing separately from the symbol 2 (used to write it in Arabic numerals) or the symbol 二 (the Chinese character for this number), or tally marks like ||, or the spelling t-w-o. These are all representations, appropriate to specific situations, of the abstract idea of the number two.

In practice, using pantones lets you design "in pantone", and then implement that design across a wide range of possible materials and means of producing color. Each pantone can be handled consistently, and then implemented in whatever means of producing color support that pantone in their gamuts, so that purple on your screen and purple on a printed page and purple on a shirt all look exactly the same.

EDIT: Hello, /r/all. Before you feel super smart and go "um a 5 year old wouldn't understand that" you should read the sidebar:

> LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds.

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Not true, as a Saint he was mostly portrayed in red. Yes he was also shown in other colours but again mostly red. Also the image we associate of him nowadays was thanks to Thomas Nast of Harpers Weekly which Haddon Sundblom of Coca-cola copied.

Origins of Santa

Nothing is changing over here short of violent revolution. Voting does nothing when both sides are in on the grift. But I appreciate your youthful optimism. If I could move to a socialist country I would do so in an instant.

It’s difficult to comprehend consciousness and willpower. So we define things we don’t understand with concepts that are more fluid subjective.

A “soul” is more than likely just a method that we have developed to understand individuality and the “self”. But like most things, the more educated you are the less you need to rely on faith and religion.

There is no scientific evidence for anything occurring in any living creature besides plain old chemical reactions. Memories, consciousness, free will, all a result of an outrageously complex blob of cells sending signals to each other.

The concept of a soul is a religious one, and therefore doesn’t “need” science to confirm or deny its existence.

We don't know we have souls, there is zero evidence for the existence of a soul and there have numerous investigations into finding it including weighing a body before and after death to see if a soul leaving the body makes it lighter.

We don't know we have souls, and there is no reason to think that anything like a "soul" exists, except in that there are some qualities often ascribed to souls that are part of the mind or personality. Those qualities are entirely dependent on the physical brain, can be changed through physical means, and end with the death of the brain.