Please read this entire message

Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):

• Loaded questions, or ones based on a false premise, are not allowed on ELI5 (Rule 6).

If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.

Pantone is used for communication between different people. If you're not communicating with someone else, then you do you and use whatever colours you like.

Usually it is for communication between a designer and a manufacturer. The designer chooses a Pantone colour, and the manufacturer makes the thing be exactly that Pantone colour.

The designer and manufacturer are usually different companies, often in different countries.

So if you are a manufacturer, you DO have to keep paying for Pantone because that is what most of your customers will be using. And if you stop accepting designs that use Pantone colours, or if you just get the Pantone colours wrong, then the customers will go to a different manufacturer.

If you are a designer, you DO have to keep paying for Pantone because that is what most of your manufacturers will be using. Unless you have the luxury of only selecting manufacturers that support <alternate colour system>, but in that case either:

1. you're a huge company, that can dictate standards to their supplier. Huge companies will have a huge existing library of designs, and the cost of switching will likely dwarf the cost of Pantone. OR
2. you're a tiny hobbyist or small business. Hobbyists & small businesses who care enough to use ANY colour system are a niche market. So most manufacturers aren't going to implement a whole separate colour system just for "hobbyists & small businesses who care about exact colours but can't or won't pay for Pantone". Those people don't have much money to spend getting things manufactured - if they had lots of money they could buy Pantone.

The only way you can stop paying for Pantone is AFTER the whole industry starts supporting the new colour system. And for the reasons listed above, that is unlikely to happen.

So any competing colour system is doomed.

It's a classic chicken/egg problem.

Graphic designer with experience with print and print production

Isn't thermodynamics (entropy) the possible casual force of time?

Yes, that’s useless for colors

[removed]

There are broadly two kinds of ways that humans make colour pictures: reflective colour and emissive colour. Because they work in completely different ways, they use different colours mixtures to get roughly the same results.

Reflective colour is what you see when white light hits an object and some of it gets reflected back into your eyes. An object we see as white reflects most of the light that hits it. Something that looks red only reflects red light and absorbs the other wavelengths like blue and green.

Colour printers use this phenomenon by layering together four different coloured inks. Cyan absorbs red and reflects blue and green. Magenta absorbs green and reflects red and blue. Yellow absorbs blue and reflects red and green. Finally, black (represented by the K in CMYK) absorbs everything.

To print a bright red in CMYK, you overlay very fine dots of yellow and magenta, which absorb the blue and green light respectively and mostly red light. It isn't perfect, which is why colour printers can struggle to get exact colour reproduction, but it's pretty close.

Emissive colour uses tiny red, blue, and green lights to directly produce the wavelengths of light your eyes perceive as colour (it doesn't need black because it can just dim the lights). Because it's using a completely different colour mixing system, translating one to the other is inexact. This is why you might design a colour image on a computer, print it out, and be surprised at how different the colours look. The computer and printer are doing their best to translate the RGB information into CMYK, but because it isn't a one-to-one match, there's a bit of fudging involved.

Pantone colours are a special case, because official Pantone inks mix all kinds of colours, not just CMYK (same with a paint mixer in a hardware shop). When you use Pantone colours, it's usually because you plan to send the final image to a professional printing shop that stocks official Pantone inks. When you pay for Pantone, you're paying for a 100% colour match with no guesswork, though for best results you'll want to make sure your computer monitor is correctly calibrated to give you the most accurate preview possible.

Sorry that was so long. Hope it helps!

What do you do for work, if it is related to this?

"Getting the colors to match exactly is one of the reasons for proofs before a big print run, "

Say, I went online and ordered printing on tshirts with image I creared in Photoshop. The Printers sent me a pdf proof via email. Now you have an image I created in Photoshop being printed on textile with a pdf proof. Impossible to know what the actual colour will be on the physical tshirt, no?

Also RGB is not consistent across various replication formats. And CMYK inks aren't quite consistent either, which is why proof prints are so important if you need color to be correct (especially if using a translation between color spaces)

[removed]

Ok if you’re going to be pedantic sRGB then. Most consumer displays are Rec 709 which has a more restricted gamut than sRGB. I’ve oversimplified to keep with the ELI5 format.

No. They are close but not color accurate

[deleted]

> It's important to note that the concept of time as the fourth dimension is a purely human construct, used to describe the progression of events and to provide a frame of reference for understanding the world around us. The concept of time does not have a physical existence in the same way that other dimensions, such as length, width, and height, do.

This is absolutely false. Spacetime is the fabric of reality, as described in Einsteins Special theory of Relativity, which is one of the most tested and proven scientific theories ever created.

Time is not a "thought construct". It is an actual dimension of reality

> RGB is more restricted

That's just completely wrong, please stop talking shit.

RGB has a larger gamut, or range of colors, than CMYK, end of.

Printing companies often offer reference books that shows exactly how CMYK colors turn out on the media you are working on, if you want to nail a color precisely they are very useful, because the transition from a screen to a piece of paper or a slab of acrylic can play A LOT of tricks. Even if it's not from the company that is going to get the job, it will still be close enough for most practical cases.

the images on the computer could, but that was never the value of pantone.

pantone is both a system of representing color and a standard with reference samples FOR those colors on or in various materials and processes.

when your #34a29c isn't as #34a29c as it is supposed to be you end up with a finger pointing game and likely no real resolution.

when your "Viva Magenta 18-1750" isn't right you bust out your $10k sample set from pantone and tell the vendor to get f'ed and remake the product.

It's not so much representing them in RGB that is a problem, you could do it with negative values if you really wanted to. The main problem is that the computer monitor wouldn't be able to display them accurately, which I reckon is most of the value Pantone added, colours with fixed IDs that have some kind of physical reference so you know what they end up looking like even if your display says otherwise.

I don't know about any of this, but I despise the word "Pantone".

I’m a offset pressman and clients can be incompetent in many ways they don’t know about colors they don’t what a press can and can’t do they just want what they want

[removed]

Thank you!

It depends. Something like a corporate logo that it supposed to be exactly a specific reference color needs to match exactly. Something less precise like a family reunion banner would have more leeway. The clients, the job details, and the nature of the job tell a lot even without explicitly asking.

We don't move through time, our perception of it changes. If we saw time as a dimension in space and looked at an unmoving ball, it would look like a cylinder with one rounded end at the point in time where it was created and one at the point where it was destroyed. A planet orbiting the sun would look like a helix spiraling along the path of the sun through the galaxy.

But our perception of time isn't broad enough. We only see one "instant" at a time, just a infinitesimal slice of the whole. We can see things changing but we can't see their whole existence at once.