


For strong colors you may need to go marine/aircraft/autopaint.Īlso, for colors defined in terms of pigments, such as Pantone and hardware store paints (or any old Dupont Duco code), when the pigment is discontinued, the color dies and you start over. Hardware store paint chips can all be made in an architectural paint. If a Pantone color exists for it, a printer can print it. That's why different swatch systems exist for different media. (either the printer goofed or the client is blind).Ĭolor matching is a hard problem. Just compare the "faulty" production to the swatch book and the designer is off the hook. The entire point of swatch books is to herd the client into color choices which are manufacturable**, and eliminate finger-pointing and fighting when a color comes out not as the client expected. (and XRite owns both Pantone and Munsell and could probably tell you.) Conversely, every Pantone color has a Munsell and CIE number. There may not be a color there, so now you're scrambling to find the nearest. You cannot map any arbitrary measurement system color (CMYK) into a named color system color (Pantone). Munsell when using "round" values out of the swatch book: 5YR/5/4.Trying to cover colors overall, but few choices. Defined in terms of Pantone's 19 ink formulations, and Pantone would like to simplify that down to 12 or 14. Curated for paper documents, particularly offset printing using Pantone licensed inks. Defined as a formula of the 8-12 pigments found in hardware store color mixing machines. This is curated for the more muted colors found in architectural coatings. Hardware store paint chips: burnt maize, uh, right.The named color system defines only certain colors, and those selections are curated toward a given purpose: Defined as measured values of reflectivity for hue, saturation and lightness. Munsell (in any surface, not light) and CIELAB: 6.25YR/4.5/3.6.CMYK (in ink) as in your example, defined as mixing of four theoretical inks.The measurement system allows you to peg numbers and codes to any color that is within gamut of the system. Long answer: You're dealing with two very different taxonomies of color. This may result in small change to the color. Short answer: Map over into that new system - one appropriate for the production process - and get the customer to sign off on it.
