RGB and CMYK and HSB, Oh My!

Dear Nancy,
I've just gotten a new logo, with two colors. The blue is: RGB: 0,118, 192, and the CMYK is 100,46,0,0. What is the HSB? (its 203,100,75, but what the heck does that mean?) The green is RGB 0,81,47. CYK 100,0,81,66 and HSB 155,100,32.

Do you know if these are standard PMS colors or not?

Dear Reader,
Thank you for asking this important question.

If they are RGB or CMYK or HSB, they are by definition NOT Pantone colors. RGB is about the color dots on your monitor that are red-green-blue. Miraculously these form an amazing range of colors... but not colors you can print. Inks will never match what you see on the screen.

CMYK uses 4 colors: cyan-magenta-yellow-black. Your monitor interprets these and puts them in a RGB space, but you can consistently reproduce these colors with ink. By definition, these are NOT Pantone colors.

Pantone colors are mixed, specific colors. CMYK can simulate these, but will not be exact.

HSB, hue-saturation-brightness, is another color matching system for monitors (there are several others out there, and new ones being created). I'll get you some more info on this in another post.

I'm a little concerned that one of your colors would be defined as RGB (red, blue, green) and the other as CMYK. This can cause unexpected results in printing. If you open this in Adobe Illustrator, it will warn you as such and ask you to decided which color space you want to use.

If I try to do color separations on an RGB file for my press, the colors are severely off. Printing projects should usually be designed using CMYK.

The bottom line is that when you hire a designer, you need to make sure that they were trained in designing for print or you may have some unpleasant surprises.