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Is there a reason we cant just define such "abstract colours" as coordinates in one of the CIE colour spaces that encompasses human vision? Since this would represent all "useful" colours and other colour spaces such as sRGB are subsets of this. Essentially im asking if all pantone colours can be mapped to CIEXYZ or CIELAB coordinates, and if so doesnt it make pantone redundant?

Gravity is the force that in a way “generates” time. Time and space are intertwined by gravity. Humans are taught to view time as a passage, a river, a flow; requiring one be here and then there. Or humans view it as a location mechanism, as though finding a coordinate on a graph.

Time is neither of those things, our lives are marked only by our experiences as decaying energy, perceptive to the combined forces within the universe.

My best answer is that perception is the force pushing us through time. Gravity, as a wave, is the force that binds certainty of position, to certainty of velocity(speed & direction), we can only absolutely certain of one of those two: a change in gravity can change the space in between the two points speed is measured over or it will mutate the velocity one is traveling.

Our relative perception of time is marked by how we decay during the journey between two points

i know i thought it'd be funny to explain blackjack and hookers to a 5yo.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-going-to-build-my-own-theme-park-with-blackjack-and-hookers

Rgb is the medium your screen operates on. Pantone operates in cmyk which is a mix of inks. That's why those are 2 different volumes. Even if you match a pantone on your screen it's gonna look different on mine. The # is the same but the look is different on both screens

There are multiple different color spaces that have different degrees of vibrance for RGB and in-between.

sRGB uses 256 shades per color. So while this totals >16M combos, if you want a shade of red to be 137.5, you’ll have to settle for 137 or 138.

Also, printers use ink, not light, and are using CMYK (K is for black, not used a lot in standard colors, moreso metallic and gold-ish). CMYK can go more vibrant for green but less so for blue/purple. It uses 0-100 for all 4, totaling 104M combos.

Printer calibration is a huge issue. My mother uses Walmart for Christmas photos and every time they look like crap. A huge benefit of Pantone is that print shops order Pantone books of swatches (stupid expensive) and they calibrate their printers are accurate, so if your digital file is using a specific Pantone color, then that is exactly was is getting printed.

Now, some shops give out their ICC profiles and you can download them it’ll show you what your image will look like from that printer. However, you are still looking at it from a digital screen emitting light and not a printed surface reflecting light.

I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF

Flexo, give me strength

And incompetent clients

Nothing really "pushes" us through it, that metaphor doesn't really work. More like it "happens" in the universe around us.

One answer is entropy. This might help:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_as_an_arrow_of_time#:~:text=Entropy%20is%20one%20of%20the,can%20increase%2C%20but%20not%20decrease.

/u/breckenridgeback did a good technical response above on this.
Basically printers use a different set of primary colours, (CYMK).

That is correct and everybody else is missing the point. Almost every Pantone color could easily be represented accurately with RGB.

There used to be a free plugin provided for photoshop that let you specify Pantone colors as the colors in the image instead of RGB. If you made an image with that plugin, it no longer has colors unless you pay up for the super real official licensed newer plugin.

RGB and CMYK are like recipes. With each value an ingredient to make a colour.

Just like in the food world, the problem with recipes is that if two different people source their ingredients (a metaphor for ink and screen pixels) from different places, they may be trying to make the same food but the end result will probably taste slightly different.. sometimes it can taste completely different.

Pantone isn't really like a recipe. It's more of a definition. In our metaphor, it's like ordering your favourite brands version of the food, its made in the same way, in very controlled conditions and is likely to taste and look the same every time you use it.

Pantone colours within Adobe software are referred to as "spot colours" and when you save these properly into a print file (like pdf), they tell the printer to use specifically loaded inks into a printer.

An approximate value can be used, but because the printer instruction is lost without the license it makes sense to completely ruin what the image looks like, as if you just save this and sent it to the printer, they would use a CYMK value instead.. and this is usually never preferred if you are using spot colours in the first place.

TL;DR RGB and CMYK are ingredients, pantone is a definition. You can't always get to the result by using similar ingredients.. to be safe and consistent removing the colour is better than changing it, as it's more obvious something has changed from when you last printed that document.

(Edited for clarity and formatting)

I love this as a ELI5 answer, it does such a great job against the more technical answers (including the Futurama reference).

A bit different for distances. With distances there is a universal smallest possible distance that all other standards can be derived from. In this case 6.25 × 10^32 planck lengths = 1cm.

Here is a dumb question... I know that green is a mix of blue and yellow, how can a printer using RGB make yellow color?

I believe they also generally just came calibrated from the factory, no?

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We're always going through time at the rate of 1s every second... That's constant speed motion (or inertial motion). Inertial motion doesn't require any force. Once accelerated, any object will continue moving unless another force slows it down.

Linking an article whose only cited source is Wikipedia does not make something comprehensive or factual. That said, I was wrong about who coined the red suit, but you are also incorrect that Santa was often portrayed in red prior to this.

Reading further into the actual Wiki article, Nast pioneered the red color of his suit into mainstream, however looking at other sources cited, Santa's suit being red is actually attributed to the poem A Visit from St Nicolas (also known as Twas the Night Before Christmas) from 1823. Nast took that depiction as inspiration and put it out on the market and Sundblom did the same for Coca-Cola which cemented it in pop culture.

Based on sifting through multiple other (non-wikipedia) sources and transcripts online, the figure of Santa is based on St Nicolas (from European folklore) who was mostly depicted in white saintly robes with accents of red, Father Christmas (from ancient English traditions) and his clothing was usually tan, blue or green, and Sinterklaas (from the Dutch) who was also portrayed mainly in white saints robes with a red cape/hat. Up until the 1800s, he was very rarely portrayed in red, and that's because up until the Victorian era the myth and depiction of "Santa" as we know today was in the process of growing and changing/melding with other cultural portrayals to get what we have today.

This gets into a cost benefit question. Pantone air carefully calibrate their prices to keep them just below where it's worthwhile to switch.

Eventually they will get too greedy, but that may take decades.

You have two arteries and veins running in your neck that provides a whole bunch of blood to your brain. When someone is strangled, the veins are compressed which restricts blood flow to the persons brain, which restricts oxygen.

If someone were to get strangled through only the airway getting cut off, the blood would still be full of oxygen and flow to the brain to keep it active.

You know some very smart five year olds.

That being said, this is a very helpful explanation.

ELI5: blackjack and hookers

Thanks, this is really fascinating.

Are you saying that a good print shop is calibrating their equipment so that it's producing colors that match Pantone in general?

Or are you saying that the graphic designer will send them the file to print and ask them to custom-match a few specific colors in the image to specific pantone shades, specific for that job?

If the latter, I'm assuming you'd pick just a couple of important shades.