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Home / 🗃️ unorganized / general notes / Why the PANTONE Colour System is hard to replace in a capitalist world

Why the PANTONE Colour System is hard to replace in a capitalist world

PANTONE is a proprietary colour system. They have dominated the colour standardization industry by having a named library of colours which required a fee to legally reproduce. Even a company like Adobe wasn't exempt from their licensing.

The textiles and literally every other industry is dependent on Pantone for colour referencing. They also have colours that cannot be reproduced on screen (RGB / Cylindrical), as well as with printing ink (CMYK). They also have special colours like metallic colours etc. So their colour library has a value, although it definitely isn't magic.

Stuart Little has created a free alternative to PANTONE, namely FREETONE. But it can't simply replace PANTONE just like that.

Why is it hard to replace with a free standard?

From Reddit:

The problem is that the base pigments (that are then used to mix the spot colors) still need to be produced by a manufacturer. This has to be done consistently so the resulting color is always the same. To create a full open color matching system you would need companies to share their company secrets how they manufacture their colors and then cooperate together in a huge system.

Pantone knows they are the market leader and price their necessary accessories accordingly. There are cheaper competitors though. In Germany we also have HKS and RAL for example.

More technical details

This has topics I have more to study about, but I have some notes taken on it already, so I have a general idea.

  • How are colours made?
    • What are colours even (Ink, Dyes, Pigments)?
      • Paint is comprised of Pigments, Dyes or Fillers and Vehicle

        • Pigments, Dyes or Fillers

          • Pigments are granular solids incorporated in paints to give colour. They sit on the surface of the canvas and are not as vibrant.
          • Dyes are colourants that dissolve in paint. They penetrate the canvas easily and have a wider colour gamut.
          • Fillers are granular solids incorporated in paints to give texture, toughness and other special properties

        • Vehicle (Binder / Binder + Solvent)

          • Binder
            • It is the adhesive that holds the paint together into a film.
            • Film refers to whatever remains after the solvent component is evaporated (so we have thin layer or film holding together the paint on the surface)
          • Solvent
            • If the vehicle has to be thinned, a diluent or solvent is used alongside the binder.
            • They adjust the viscosity of the paint

        • Additives

          • They may be used to adjust special properties like surface tension, bacterial grown, anti-freeze, etc.

  • How does paint work?
    • Physical paint always uses subtractive mixing, as more components absorb more light, they are not sources.

  • The special formulas in which certain paints are made are standardized by PANTONE.
    • A formula is not magic, but a consistent procedure.

So what you need to realize is that paint and colours are nothing more than everyday objects just provided to you in a mixed and mashed form.

  • After all, they are just colourful because
    • The elements of the physical universe have aspects of it exhibit certain phenomena we call charges, which we call charged particles
    • And charges particles are defined by having a field or aura around them that extends to infinity
      • And falls down in intensity with distance by inverse square law
      • Because the world is 3D and uniform outward radiation would be spherical
      • And the surface are of a sphere is \(\displaystyle 4\pi r^2\)
      • And anything at a single point on the surface would be per unit area
      • Which would be \(\displaystyle \frac{1}{4\pi r^2}\) times that.
    • And anything that changes velocity or state of motion accelerates and
    • Accelerating charged particles also change their fields intensities around them, but the change can only propagate at the speed of information
    • So any new change will lag behind the previous change which flowed outward at the speed of information
    • Which means if you oscillate a charged particle, the field around it will also oscillate and flow outward
    • And this outward flow of change is what we call radiation
      • Like if a string was always being flicked at one end, we'd say
        • The rope is the rope field
        • And at the rope's end is your hand
        • So your hand is constantly radiating the rope field
        • And the waves would be the photons
          • Although we call particles of mechanical waves, aka sound waves, phonons
          • Even though mechanical waves are just a larger scale phenomena of electromagnetic waves
            • Like waves of electromagnetic waves
              • Which would be just a low amplitude high frequency wave added to a high amplitude low frequency wave if I'm correct
      • And also just like every sound is comprised of multiple unit frequencies in several amplitudes
        • Which is again because you never vibrate many things together at specific exact frequencies, but only to close to a frequency
        • Like when you use something like a tuning fork
        • Because vibration is just due to the arrangements of particles, approximated by their Elastic Moduli
      • Every motion is also comprised of multiple oscillations at several amplitudes
        • If you think of it as added oscillations of a pendulum
        • Or deeper (how you always need a home to come back to)
      • Only at a mathematical modelling level though, but it's still not a bad way to think of it, is it?
      • So this is what we plot on a graph and call the frequency spectrum of so and so material.
  • Which is all a fancy way to say accelerating charged particles emit radiation
  • And every atom has charged particles contained with them
    • So they have a characteristic radiation spectrum
    • And same goes for their molecules
    • Which is generally in sync with the material (i.e., the material's radiation spectrum would be the same as the molecule's radiation spectrum, at least to an extent)
      • Since molecular bonds don't change the spectrum much, unless you mess with the temperature
        • Because temperature just means pushing the particles more and making them vibrate more rapidly than how they were at the room temperature
    • Our eyes have cone cells (colour detectors) and rod cells (intensity detectors) and
    • We have three kinds of cone cells and
    • Our three kinds of cone cells has sensitivites to a different range of frequencies and amplitudes
      • Meaning, for different frequencies encountered of a given amplitude, the sensitivity or response signal level produced by the cell is different
    • Which leads to a given stream of radiation produces a different response in accordance to the amplitudes of the component frequencies in each of the three cells
    • Which leads to the total response being a combination of the three different responses
      • Which we call tristimulus
    • Which the brain recognizes as a specific tristimulus value
    • And each of those tristimulus values are perceived as separate
    • And we call these perceptions colour.
      • And we name the three cone cells by the colour that corresponds to the tristimulus of the pure frequency radiation of what's the peak frequency in the cell's response curve
      • Which are red, green and blue
      • Although for perceptual modelling, we like to think of colours based on their hue, saturation and lighting model on a perceptually uniform colour space such as CIELUV or CIELAB, which are defined by the International Committee on Illumination (CIE).
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