If Pantone wanted to go after Corel or Serif how would its software generate new color books for those applications? Better yet, how would it generate new color books for industry specific software, like our large format RIP applications? Adobe has caught a lot of flak over this issue, but Pantone is 100% the culprit on this one.

Understanding the Context

Does anyone know of a chart that comverts Sherwin Williams paint numbers to Pantone numbers. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Stuart Pantone claims they were "forced" to launch their Connect service because Adobe didn't update their versions of Pantone's swatch books. The way I see it those digital Pantone swatch book files are form of advertising for Pantone to sell those physical swatch books.

Key Insights

They're not the only company making spot color systems (Toyo, Trumatch). in corel draw there isn't a way to set up the document to be exclusively rgb or cmyk, and you can in fact have pantones, cmyk and rgb all in the same document. I don't thing its the color management since i've tried all the settings, and anything in there changes the output of the documents but it still displays cmyk colors as bright rgb colors. That and the cmyk colors were displaying as the ... 3M vinyl book says its Pantone Black C (which looks more like a smokey-black, imo), but we always go with the PMS formula for Dark Bronze and its spot on.

Final Thoughts

Matching vinyl colors to RGB, CMYK or Pantone colors is a very common issue. Attached is a chart with approximate RGB, CMYK and HexID's for all of our graphic film colors.