Con­vert­ing col­ors between dif­fer­ent color systems

[This is a trans­la­tion of the arti­cle I wrote over a year ago in Icelandic.]

Con­vert­ing RGB col­ors to CMYK for print­ing pur­poses or Color Man­age­ment, is some­thing we designer have to deal with almost every day. It’s easy to get infor­ma­tion about Color Man­age­ment in books and on the web. I am not going to go through that here but con­cen­trate on other less com­mon conversions.

What I have in mind are color sys­tems that spe­cific indus­tries use for choos­ing col­ors. These sys­tems are like RAL which is com­monly used for car paint and plas­tics, NCS which is a com­mon sys­tem for house paint col­ors and many more I am sure you have not heard of.

Your client might call you and say some­thing like this: „There is this com­pany in Ger­many which is going to paint my new Lear-jet in our company’s col­ors. They say they need it in RAL col­ors, what ever that means… “ – and he expects you to know what it means.

The web­site EasyRGB.com has many of these sys­tem and has made these con­ver­sions easy. But first you have to have the RGB val­ues of the color you want to convert.

Lets say we want to make this request of turn­ing the com­pany col­ors to RAL. One of the col­ors for the jet is Pan­tone 130 which you prob­a­bly would have in an Illus­tra­tor or InDe­sign file in CMYK col­ors. Let’s use Illus­tra­tor to get this color over to RGB.

Make a new CMYK file in Illustrator.

Make a square and fill it with Pan­tone 130. (It could just as well be any CMYK color.)

Con­vert your file to RGB by going to File > Doc­u­ment Color Mode > RGB Color.

Select the box and to to the Color panel. Click on the CMYK color box (far right, under the 100%)

RALlitir

Now we have the RGB color values.

RALlitir2

Then we go to our favorite web browser to EasyRGB.com

Fill in the RGB val­ues in this win­dow and click Match.

We now get a win­dow which shows us how closely the RAL color sys­tem can reflect our Pan­tone color and optional variations.

RALgluggi2

What I always do is to take a screen shot of this win­dow (Com­mand + Con­trol + Option + Shift + 4) and paste it into the Illus­tra­tor file to check the matches. As you see I have a pretty good sim­u­la­tion (not always this good) and can send Match #1, RAL-1012 to the painter.

RalMatch-ai

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