HEX to Pantone

How do I find the Pantone color closest to a HEX code?

Enter the HEX code (for example #e31837) and the tool converts it to red, green and blue values, measures how different it looks from each of 38 PANTONE coated reference colors, and returns the closest one. Here the output is PANTONE 1785 C (#E4002B, nearest match), with the table's HEX for that ink in brackets.

PANTONE is a trademark of Pantone LLC; this site is independent of it. The reference HEX values are commonly published screen approximations of physical inks, and the table covers only a sliver of Pantone's catalog, so the suggestion is a lead to check in a printed guide.

The usual situation: a web color that now needs ink

Most people arrive here with a color that was born on screen. A startup picks #1DB954 in a design tool, ships a website, and a year later needs a printed banner or a screen-printed T-shirt where the vendor wants a Pantone number. The HEX tells you what the color looks like on a monitor. A spot ink is a physical mixture whose appearance depends on paper, coating and light, so the two can only ever be matched approximately.

For #1DB954 the tool returns PANTONE 355 C (#00A550, nearest match). That's a reasonable shortlist entry, though 355 C in the table is darker and less yellow than the input.

How the nearest match is chosen

1. The HEX is parsed into RGB. Three-digit shorthand is expanded by doubling each digit (abc becomes aabbcc), as CSS does.
2. Your color and every table entry are converted to CIELAB, using the sRGB standard's D65 white point. The CSS Color Module Level 4 spec describes Lab as "intended to be perceptually uniform": equal steps in it look roughly equally different.
3. Each pair is scored with CIEDE2000 (ΔE00), the CIE's color-difference formula, which corrects Lab's remaining unevenness in blues, grays and saturated colors. The implementation reproduces the published test data from Sharma, Wu and Dalal (2005).
4. The smallest difference wins. Ties go to whichever entry appears first in the table.

Only the winner is displayed. You get no score, so a near-perfect match and a poor one look the same in the output. As a rough guide, a ΔE00 under 2 is hard to see side by side, and above 10 the colors are clearly different.

Reading the result

A perceptual measure fixes the worst failures of plain RGB distance, which used to pair strong colors with grays because a big gap on one channel outweighed smaller gaps spread across three. It can't add inks the table doesn't have, though. Hot pink shows both sides:

Both pinks beat the gray, but both are about 15 away, because the table holds no light pinks, and they are practically tied. When the top result is that far off or that close to a runner-up, compare the two or three entries in the same hue family yourself with the Pantone to HEX lookup.

#e31837 is the friendlier case: 1785 C scores 2.4, with 1795 C (3.5) and Red 032 C (4.5) close behind. Those inks are clearly different on paper, so check all three in a physical guide.

Accepted input

The error message is "Enter a valid 3- or 6-digit HEX color, e.g. #1e90ff." It appears for 4- and 8-digit alpha codes, color names, stray characters such as g, or more than one #. If your color is in rgb() form, use the RGB to Pantone matcher instead, or turn it into a HEX code first with the RGB to HEX converter.

What it won't tell you

The tool doesn't return uncoated (U) or pastel library names, CMYK builds, or a list of alternatives. Two entries in the table, PANTONE 871 C and 877 C, are listed by Pantone in its Metallics Coated library (877 C on pantone.com), not Solid Coated. A flat HEX can't represent a metallic sheen, so when one of them wins the output adds a label, as in PANTONE 877 C (#8A8D8F, nearest match, Metallics Coated) for #8A8D8F. If you only need a color for screen use, skip Pantone entirely and pick it with the color picker.