Matching Pantone References – And When To Say No

A while ago, I had to deal with dark yet beautiful sunset shots (often backlit), sometimes with major lens flares. The subject was wearing a shirt with brand colours, but it was dark, heavily affected by the overall colour cast and with occasional flares in front of it. There was nothing wrong with the cinematography itself, it was gorgeous. But it’s a struggle to balance fidelity to brand colours vs. realism in these situations. How would you address these kind of shots?

JF

When matching color accurately, caution is in order when getting device dependent color values. It’s actually not 100% accurate to get color values in RGB or CMYK. What color a specific RGB value represents is a factor of the color space, including the gamma.

A specific RGB value in sRGB (2.2), Rec 709 (2.4), or DCI P3 (2.6) results in different visible colors.

If you go back to Pantone documentation they always specify their colors in Lab color, which is device independent.

Now in most cases the difference may not be noticeable. But if someone is as precise as referring to Pantone, it may matter.

And on a minor side note – hex is just a different representation or RGB. The six characters in Hex represent RRGGBB, with RR being the hexadecimal representation of the numeric RGB values. For example FF = 255. Whenever you enter hex or RGB it is 100% the same thing.