Hi Susan and the rest,
I'll reply to everyone in one mail, so the information doesn't get scattered all over the place.
> This is huge...
> This opens another area of proprietary design which affects the fashion industry.
Yes you are correct. This is huge and might affect the textile industry as well. DIN accepted our proposal because we argued as follows:
1) If a proprietary colour spec is being used in workflows, everyone needs a licence, so the choice of one person or group affects everyone else (vertical barrier).
2) It gets even worse across sectors. Imagine you just selected that nice Pantone spot colour for your company logo. Now you want to paint your company building in that colour and tell the painter/paint vendor "I want Pantone X-Y-Z". The likely answer ist "We don't do Pantone; we have our own colour system. Here's a reference, choose your colour." (horizontal barrier 1)
3) Today, many companies produce across countries, which only accelerates the problems. (horizontal barrier 2) This is the reason as to why DIN plans to take this colour standard to ISO later and make it an international standard.
The reason for starting with print was simply that all of the experts working on this are working in the printing industry. Plus, one of our partners is FOGRA (https://www.fogra.de/index.php?menuid=1&getlang=en), which is the leading organisation for printing standards in Europe and beyond.
Q&A:
"Since you already have a prototype, are you talking about metallic inks?"
No, metallic inks are off the table for now, as are neons. The prototypes have been created on VERY expensive inkjet printers with more than four inks. This is not feasible for regular print runs. The prototypes only served as a proof of concept for DIN.
"How do you define a real color system?"
As a system ;) In a system you can calculate e.g. complementary colours or colour harmonies. Pantone is just a collection of colours that was expanded and changed over the decades. There is no system behind it. NCS, on the other hand, is a real commercial colour system.
"Better in what way?"
It's open, free, and it uses LAB/HLC, so it covers the whole spectrum of colours visible to the human eye. Plus, unlike, e.g. Pantone, it's impossible to change the colour values or remove a colour from the system, because it's all based on physics and math.
"At what stage of work within DIN will ink formulas be published one way or another?"
At this stage (phase 5 of 9) it's not even sure that the ink formulas will be part of the DIN spec. Phase 5 means working with ink manufacturers to create the formulas. If they don't become part of the standard, they will become freely available from our website and/or become part of the printed reference.
"So my question is: from your LCH representation, can you ensure the creation of an ink so that 2 unrelated people could create the same color?"
Yes, once we have the ink formulas. That's what's currently being worked on.
"And from the printshop point of view, getting any spot color from the catalog is just about following a mixing recipe accurately, so it's easy and not too bothersome."
For the printshop maybe (not necessarily), but not for the ink manufacturers. These must pay licence fees to Pantone et al. for the use of the ink formulas. It's a bit like Monsanto, really. Plus, some Pantone inks are very hard to reproduce, because recipes are too fine-grained (e.g. one tenth of base colour x), and ink vendors have to juggle with 18 base colours for these recipes! This makes the production quite expensive. Add to that the experience of many in the printing industries that printed Pantone colour references are notoriously unreliable for various reasons. The HLC Colour Atlas, on the other hand, will be produced with strict quality controls in place.
As to the file format, the contract with DIN requires that we create two palettes in the CxF3 format (https://www.xrite.com/page/cxf-color-exchange-format), one with LAB values another one with spectral colours. The latter are even more precise than LAB, but I don't think any software supports it right now. We will make those available for download from our website and also add LAB-based versions as SBZ and ASE files, respectively. SBZ and ASE don't support spectral colours, so projects that want to use the latter need to write an import filter for CxF3 ;)
According to the current roadmap the final colour references and the digital palettes will be available in April 2018. The standard is supposed to be written by June 2018 and will then be published by DIN.
I hope I have answered all of your questions.
Christoph