Familiarity is the big design advantage of Pantone color. I look at the samples, pick a color, and that’s what I will get. Whether or not my monitor is calibrated or whether or not I am using a computer at all.
From a business perspective, if you’re logo is Reflex Blue, then any reputable print shop can print your leave-behinds and any decent sign shop can make your tradeshow display.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPhoto_RGB_color_space
that do a better job of modelling many forms of color vision than conventional RGB spaces.
The response of the eye under ordinary situations is modeled well with three stimulus values, but real colors are on a spectrum. Consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D
which uses a total of six colors and high precision filters such that there is a red that passes the left filter and a red that passes the right filter. The two reds look almost the same without the filters, but with the filters one becomes completely invisible. In situations where light is interacting with something other than your eye (filters, a prism) the physics become vastly more complex.
Speaking of 3D images lately I've been frustrated with wide gamut displays because I make images that are viewed through these glasses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_3D
Namely the red channel goes to the left eye and the green and blue go to the left eye. (0, 180, 0) in sRGB is converted by the application (Photoshop, Web Browser) to something like (16, 176, 15) before sending to a wide gamut model. Adding a little bit of red and blue to the wide gamut green makes it look less saturated and more like the sRGB green, but it's bad for anaglyph stereograms because the extra red light causes an unwanted ghost image to appear in the wrong channel.
Here is was just thinking Pantone colours were some fancy standardised names…
Also, TIL “fresnel” is the name for that colour/pattern!
- Those "invisibility shields" you see videos of
- In (vision) glasses, to correct for double vision (you can get prism in the glasses or, if the double vision is too much for that, a sticky "fresnel" lens that gets attached to the glass. I have one setting on my desk that I was using before my corrective surgery, actually... woo, tangents)
I am more familiar with "Fresnel" being a shading technique responsible for "rim lighting" in computer graphics, that's because this is an application of Fresnel equations, discovered by Fresnel. But in other fields, "Fresnel" can mean something else entirely, with the only thing in common being that it can be traced back to the work of Fresnel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
EDIT: found it! It’s called MERL (https://merl.com/brdf)
Modern PBR specifically doesn’t really rely on artists choosing a BRDF though. The idea is to pick one that’s accurate, and expose a handful of variables to control it (roughness and metalness mostly)
But if it does, I am not sure how useful it would be because the effort to get an ink/paint that met all those requirements would be at least as complex as the Pantone factory.
Probably more complex since Pantone designs colors for the production facilities they have in existence (or can procure).
Basically the problem is who will make the color you specified?
There are problems with Pantone, but availability is not ordinarily among them.
If you're buying a lot you can just design the color, get a bunch of samples mixed and pick one.
Hell, you could go to good paint shop and get anything you want matched and get a recipe for it, that's how car can be painted to match the paint that changed the color with age.
Just costly for anything not mass market.
Achieving that level of known properties requires equipment, personnel, and materials beyond what would make commercial sense outside of the market segment in which the cost of Pantone systems make sense.
To put it another way, cost of entry is Pantone’s moat and why it has been filling the same market segment for many decades…where $21/month is pretty much no different than free.
But RAL is definitely the better choice for anything but printing... if it has your color (colour?).
For example RGB blue #0000ff is so bright it can not be printed, if you tried it would look a lot darker blue than the screen shows. This issue with printed colours looking different from screen space colours is that printed colours will also look different depending on the surface they are printed onto and a variety of other variable.
Your work around is fine for me as I work in RGB and would really only need the Pantone when im printing once every 5 years? If you are a print designer then you will be using the colours all day every day and having to switch or a reference that isn't exact results in expensive printing mistakes.
Unfortunately, the color gamut of CMYK is quite limited. If you have a print job that requires a very specific color, say, for your logo, it can be cheaper to order a black and spot color print run. If the color is out of gamut, you have to provide a spot color.
That spot color, at least in the US, was always specified in PANTONE.
This of course then only gives an approximation. However this isn't typically used for digital output, but the pantone ID is carried along so that when printing (or otherwise producing) the physical object the correct color and material is being used.
(And some 3D rendering/CAD tool might also deal with reflections etc. in digital space)
You get best estimate, make your pics, get it printed and then actually see it.
Not exactly. What primaries? What gamma? What max intensity?
Sure, many of these things have generally accepted defaults. But point being it's still not that simple. RGB only seems completely encompassing when you're thinking about colors of emitted light that can be created by the computer in front of you. But it's nowhere close to being able to represent the full gamut of possible colors. For example, it's missing all violets!
More info in this video: https://youtu.be/OBs2-2KcN-w
From what I briefly read, most of Pantone doesn't even fit in CMYK.
Also, personally I find that I'd like to have some kind of printed swatches just so I can figure out the color of my stuff at home and find the corresponding paint, sealant or whatever. I could just pirate Pantone and print some of it for like twenty bucks—however, if a third of it is outside CMYK, then I'm rather out of luck. Bit of a weird problem to have.
Edit: Also, converting from Pantone to regular RGB/CMYK is a lot more lossy than one would think. If I reference a Pantone product, that pretty much covers all properties of the printed surface, including things like reflectivity angles, fluorescence and phosphorescence. A cheap xRite will already measure reflectivity in 13 wavelength bands. And then it'll average those 13 characteristics into 3 RGB numbers. Professional color measurement tools can have hundreds of properties per ink type, thereby making reduction to 3 values even more lossy.
If I give you RGB, that merely specifies the color at direct reflection under normal light. If I give you a Pantone ID, you also now how it'll look from the side or under UV light. RGB specifies an averaged wavelength mixture, Pantone specifies a chemical ink mixture.
Edit2: You know these car paints that have fresnel reflections, meaning they appear to have a different color of you look at them from a different angle? That's an excellent example of a case where you need to specify a specific ink type like Pantone, because the RGB value changes based on the viewing angle.