We have tools to help you with the world of color!
Pantone is the company that sets the design standards for professional color use for print and products. It provides a common color language to help creative teams use the same colors without ambiguitiy. Pantone 10172 C in the Premium Metallics swatch may look like shiny purple to the average person, but to a designer utilizing the Pantone standard, it may mean that purple, lilac, puce, lavender or blue-violet is not what the client wants. It points to a specific color. In order to truly take advantage of Pantone tools, you need a calebrated monitor and a calibrated printer.
Pantone Plus Series Portable Design Guide Swatches (2014), (Media Center use only):
ColorMunki Monitor Calibrator (can be checked out)
XRite Color Passport for photography (can be checked out)
HERE IS MY COLOR and it translates to Pantone P-77-14 U, Hex #a64d7a, CMYK 0,67,0,40 and RGB 166, 77, 122. All four of these codes create the same color. You can use Photoshop to translate the code for you -- I started with the RGB code and then went from there. This purple-ish color is one of the colors used in Gmail for text. It gave me the RGB code but nothing else. Now, I know what the Pantone code is if I want to put the color in a file I am working on.
Working with color can seem simple enough, but when you design digital and print items, color is part of the overall design that is essential for and effective end product.
CMYK vs RGM color modes
CMYK is for printing. Cyan, magenta, yellow and black (K) make up the subtractive color wheel.
RGB is for items that would be displayed on a computer screen or projected. Red, green and blue are created with light and starts with black. White is the combining of all colors, thus the RGB color wheel is additive in nature.
The color wheels for CMYK and RGB are different. RGB will print out in slightly different colors than you designed with if you designed in that mode.
