Mapping Pantone to RAL to RGB

While artists may once have created and used their own chemical compositions and processes for developing their own palettes, since the development of commercial paint production, paint colours - shades such as burnt umber; ultramarine; lead white; prussian blue and so forth - have been largely standardised (Finlay, 2003). 

This formalisation has also given us commercial colour swatches and atlases. Our own eyes had inspired RGB - red, green, blue - in the 1900s with the Young–Helmholtz theory of three color vision (Siddiqi, 2023) which was used for technology - from television into imaging, and into PCs. 

The Germans created RAL in the 1920s from the National Committee for Delivery and Quality Assurance (Reichs-Ausschuß für Lieferbedingungen; RAL Colour, 2023) using a numeric code which seemed to be used for industrial applications. 

Then in design and fashion, the Pantone company created their own colour palettes in the 1960s (Eiseman & Recker, 2014; Herbert, 2007). 

The terrible thing is that most of these colours have next to no cross-over. A colour code in one system does not necessarily have an equivalent in another system. 

• However, we can check a RAL colour against a Pantone colour by going here: https://hextoral.com/ral-to-pantone-conversion/
• If we have a RAL colour, we can enter our code and look up the Pantone colour. If we don't know our RAL colour, we can find the closest shade, and seek the Pantone equivalent here: https://hextoral.com/ral-chart/ral-classic/
• If we have an RGB colour, we can seek the Pantone equivalent here: https://www.coderstool.com/rgb-pantone

At least that gets us started.

Sam

References:

CodersTool. (2023). RGB to Pantone. https://www.coderstool.com/rgb-pantone

Eiseman, L., & Recker, K. (2011). Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color. Chronicle Books.

Finlay, V. (2003). Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox. Hodder & Stoughton.

Herbert, L., with Mead, L. (2007). The King of Colour: The story of Pantone and the man who captured the rainbow. Pantone, Inc.

RAL Colour. (2023). Home. https://www.ral-farben.de/en/

Siddiqi, O. (2023). The RGB Colour Model. https://owaissiddiqi.co.uk/Blogs/RGB/

Smith, N. S., & Fairchild, M. D. (2022). Virtual Colour Atlas. Color Research & Application, 47(4), 817-826. https://doi.org/10.1002/col.22780