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TenLongFingers t1_j1w3vq3 wrote

So the science of color is actually pretty weird. It doesn't behave as simply as you think.

Color behaves differently depending on how it's made. For instance, mixing all the paint (pigment, subtractive) together will make black, but mixing all the light together (light, additive) will make white. Pantone deals with pigments, and RGB deals with light. They're so different that there some colors are only available in light (RGB) that don't exist in pigments (Pantone).

(Without getting too into it, that's actually why cartoons nowadays are so much more vibrant and brighter. Everything is now made with RGB tools for RGB screens, and we skip the pigment stage from when things were painted on paper.)

Think of it like asking why there isn't a direct conversion between gallons and pounds. They both seem to measure the same thing at a glance, but they're actually different.

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JohannesWurst t1_j20r381 wrote

Couldn't you also describe color kind of objectively as a certain wavelength? I guess purple has no wavelength associated to it.

Anyway, in the end the human eye of a non-colorblind person (sorry) decides which color a surface is. Two surfaces should be considered the same color if they stimulate the color receptors in the same way.

Pantone colors, CMYK colors and RBG colors still just stimulate color receptors in the eyes, so I still feel like they should be translatable.

There are a finite amount of RGB colors, of course, so we'd have to talk about arbitrary precision real number RGB, not just 24 bit. And another issue I can see, is that RBG can look different depending on the screen. There are calibrated screens, though – I think that means that someone has defined how FF0000 has to look like exactly.

This is not a correction, more a question. How can CMYK, RGB and Pantone be incompatible if the final arbiter is the same human eye?

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csl512 t1_j212eht wrote

Nope. Spectral colors are those made by pure wavelengths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color

In the chart in that page, there's a horseshoe shaped curve with numbers between 300 and 700. Those correspond to wavelengths. Anything not on that line cannot be made with just a single wavelength.

Color science is super weird and unintuitive, and relies very heavily on the human perception of it, which involves cone receptors tuned to different ranges of light, approximately but not exactly red green and blue.

If you really want to get confused, https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/18rbn2/is_your_red_the_same_as_my_red/

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