Where can I find popular pantone and hexadecimal colors?

February 9, 2006 3:44 PM

Where can I find out what pantone and hexadecimal colors are for popular things?

Say I want to know what the pantone color or hexidecimal color for the green on the dollar bill is, or for a fire engine, or for the various colors on the old rainbow colored Apple logo...where could I find out that info?

posted by JPigford to media & arts (13 comments total)

Using Firefox, install ColorZilla and open up a photograph of the object in question, click on the dropper, and hover over the color you're trying to get. The fire engine on a randomly selected image here indicates that it's #800808.
posted by phoebus at 4:05 PM on February 9, 2006

Hold up a Pantone swatchbook to whatever you want to match, and see which swatch looks the closest.
posted by designbot at 4:06 PM on February 9, 2006

That's what I do!

And I used to carry my swatchbook with me almost everywhere, until it got stolen. Those things are expensive to replace!
posted by luriete at 4:07 PM on February 9, 2006

phoebus, you can also scan in a picture from a magazine if you can't find one online, and check those colors.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:12 PM on February 9, 2006

Pantone to Hex reference

- Swatchbooks do fade slightly so beware (at least, there is a warning on them about fading). I remember CorelDraw having support for Pantone swatches, maybe the eye dropper would assist with this.

- Pantone are unfriendly with open source software - you might want to check this.

This info was found on the wikipedia article for Pantone.
posted by rc55 at 5:23 PM on February 9, 2006

Yes, I was being facetious.

You can not accurately check the color of any reproduction. The tool you need is a spectrometer, there used to be a cheap one for the mac for just this purpose.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:33 PM on February 9, 2006

it's important to remember that the way the ink lays on a pantone color book may be different than the way the ink lays on another kind of paper ... or another kind of material ... so exact matches may be hard to do

also, rc55, that color chart is nice, but it's missing a few colors ... the ones without numbers, the numbers under 100, and gold and silver shades

still, it would be very cool if certain art departments that make certain proofs for our products would reference this hex to pantone page and at least get the colors halfway close on the proofs

i deal with pantone books daily ...
posted by pyramid termite at 8:52 PM on February 9, 2006

Using Firefox, install ColorZilla and open up a photograph of the object in question, click on the dropper, and hover over the color you're trying to get. The fire engine on a randomly selected image here indicates that it's #800808.

You're kidding, right? A photograph of a dollar bill could have a huge range of different values, depending on the white balance of the camera.
posted by delmoi at 9:23 PM on February 9, 2006

Also, keep in mind that the "hex" values you chose are going to look different on everyone's monitor anyway, so it doesn't really matter too much unless you're trying to do print reproduction. Your eyes actually do a *lot* of adjustments to the colors depending on lighting and everything too.

If you get the pantone correct, you'll have the ability to print something that will look the same under the same lighting conditions as the original, which would be useful if the two things are going to be viewed next to each other. It would also look correct on a color-calibrated monitor.

If you don't need those things, you're better off just eyeballing the colors untill you get one that you think looks close, IMO.
posted by delmoi at 9:27 PM on February 9, 2006

Also, keep in mind that the "hex" values you chose are going to look different on everyone's monitor anyway

Pfff. This is what colour profiles are for.

If you get something like this (pricy) then you can- a least in theory -do accurate colour reproduction on all sorts of different paper types. There are similar devices you can attach to your monitor as well.

Colour is actually insanely complicated, you might want to read this it looks like a decent introduction to colour management.
posted by public at 2:39 AM on February 10, 2006

I'm not needing to pick up random object and get their pantone value...I'm asking where can I find this info. Like the blue in the intel logo...somebody has to know what the pantone value of that is. That sort of info.
posted by JPigford at 6:50 AM on February 10, 2006

somebody has to know what the pantone value of that is

Yes, the Intel marketing department. Most of the time this is proprietary information. It's not top-secret, but most marketing departments won't go out and publish the information either.
posted by GuyZero at 7:12 AM on February 10, 2006

colorimeter
posted by theperfectcrime at 12:11 AM on February 11, 2006