This is the one more reason why I love my iPhone. Pantone recently released the MyPantone app for iPhone OS 3.0 or higher. This app is going to be extremely useful for designers, decorators, and artists who work with Pantone colors, the industry standard. The problem many artists find with Pantone is it’s not always possible to have one of those fan books of color swatches with you, and they are EXPENSIVE!
This app allows designers to use their creativity in the field, easily cross-referencing color palettes on the go. myPANTONE gives designers and artists access to the Pantone Color Libraries including the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® for coated, uncoated and matte stock; the PANTONE Goe™ System for coated and uncoated; Pantone Pastels for coated and uncoated; Pantone Fashion + Home Smart Color System. This app allows artists and designers to create color palettes of complimentary, analogous and triadic color combinations.
You can use the iPhone’s built-in camera to photograph whatever inspires you, from fashion to design and nature and extract specific colors for your photo and match those colors to their closest Pantone counterpart. I used myPANTONE recently to photograph part of a design to color match for print. We’ll see how it does. I’ll post the results in a follow-up to this review.
One of the best things about myPANTONE is the ability to create a palette and share it with anyone with an iPhone or instantly post your palette to Facebook or Twitter with text or voice notes. Designers can also send clients or other designers color patches or application-ready swatch files for the Adobe Creative Suite, Corel Draw and QuarkXPress!
Each color swatch in myPANTONE includes sRGB, HTML and L*a*b* values. Some designers have been irritated by the lack of CMYK, but you can be assured those will be included in a future version, after all, this is still just v1.
myPANTONE is available in the app store for USD $9.99 and can be used with the iPhone or iPod Touch.
Features:
• Get your color inspiration and create your color scheme from these PANTONE color system libraries:
• PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® (coated, uncoated and matte)
• PANTONE Goe™ (coated and uncoated)
• PANTONE Pastels (coated and uncoated)
• PANTONE FASHION + HOME (paper and cotton)
• Includes sRGB, HTML and L*a*b* data
• You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color
• Images loaded on your iPhone
• Directly from images taken by your iPhone camera
• Automatically generates harmonious color combinations
• Cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries
• Once you have created your color palettes you can then share them in a variety of ways:
• E-mail an HTML image of your palette
• E-mail color palettes that can be used in the Adobe® Creative Suite (.ase files), QuarkXPress® and CorelDraw®
• Upload to the myPANTONE.com palette sharing web site
• Other features include:
• Text and voice Annotation of palettes
• Post notifications of new palettes to Twitter and Facebook
• GPS tagging of palettes
Check back for follow-ups to this review.
