Pantone, what is the deal?

[gwpriester]

Pantone was originally designed to provide a formula for printers who could mix base colored printing inks to produce a color that would be exactly the same anywhere in the world. It was useful for corporate identity programs. So logo colors and corporate color schemes would be consistent no matter who did the printing.

Designers and art directors specified colors from the ubiquitous PMS (Pantone Matching System) swatch books (Coated and Un-coated) and the printers obligingly mixed the ink to the formula.

In that respect, Pantone is still a viable way to specify colors that will be consistent.

Except almost all printing these days is done on presses capable of printing 4 or more colors at a time and so it became necessary for designers and art directors to be able to specify a Pantone spot color in CMYK. And so came the CMYK swatch-books, and the metallic color swatch-books, and on and on.

Just some trivia from someone who worked in the biz in the days before computers.

[RKissane]

Gary,

How long did it take to chisel out the stone for the prints Sorry could not resist.

So do you think with CMYK that Pantone is really required for most print jobs?

Ray

[timhines]

I think you're taking the lith ...

[gwpriester]

How long did it take to chisel out the stone for the prints Sorry could not resist.

I get no respect.

I think most corporations and companies that have specific colors still specify color in Pantone and the CMYK equivalent. However CMYK can only match a percentages of all the Pantone spot colors, I think it is something like half can be matched exactly, and about 25% come close and the remaining 25% are not very close at all.

Back in the days when we pulled our stone prints, I wrote a book Looking Good in Color in which I tried to explain all of this.

[RKissane]

I would of though that CMYK would be a much higher percentage in matching Pantone colors. Learn something new all the time. Thanks Gary for the information.

Ray

[Acorn]

I would of though that CMYK would be a much higher percentage in matching Pantone colors. Learn something new all the time. Thanks Gary for the information.
Ray

Ray, I found this nugget on-line - "Most of the Pantone colours don’t have an exact CMYK match either, which is understandable considering Pantone uses 14 inks and CMYK only four."
A number of printer can handle extended gamut printing which is CMYK plus green, orange & violet ==> CMYKOGV.
Apparently this covers 92% of Pantone's PMS. This is why so many cheaper supermarkets own brands are precisely colour matched to the leading brands. Seven inks versus 1100+ spot colours so a print can readily batch multiple jobs, saving ink, time and frustration.

The Epson SureColor P9000 Violet Spectro inkjet uses 10 inks for 99% Pantone matching.
If only I had a spare £7k!

Just been playing with https://www.printkick.com/tools/image-colour-match and Xara's Palette from Photo to pass the time.

Acorn

[Grafix Smelter]

I guess for you pro's, swatches are still needed. Pantone use to do a free online colour picker but it is now behind a pay wall with a "free" trial option.
Their old version is still listed on the Internet Archive :- https://web.archive.org/web/20230000...m/color-finder