Compare the two images below.
Do you notice a difference? The image on the right appears “yellower” than the image on the left, which looks more goldenrod by comparison.
The first Pikachu is from the Pokemon.com Pokédex, while the second is from the Pokemon.co.jp equivalent.
What gives?
Color spaces
If you’re reading this on a computer or phone screen, as most of you are, each pixel on that screen is likely composed of three colors: red, green, and blue. By adjusting the intensity of each color, millions of colors can be seen on your screen. This is the RGB color model.
For color printing, however, a different color model is used. If you’ve ever had a color printer and ran out of ink, you’ll likely know it uses four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. This is because printers use the CMYK color model (K stands for “key”, if you were curious – I grew up assuming it was the last letter in “black”, instead of B to avoid confusion with “blue”).
I just so happen to have the PSD file for the Pikachu image above, so let’s open it in Affinity and see what comes it says.
Let’s break this part down.
- 1504 × 1431px is the resolution of the image: 1,504 pixels wide by 1,431 pixels tall
- 2.15MP is the total count of pixels in the image: 1,504 times 1,431 is 2,152,224 pixels, or 2.15 megapixels
- CMYK is the color space (as discussed above), with the “A” standing for alpha, the layer which defines the transparency levels of the image
- The 8 refers to the number of bits per color. This image has 8 bits per color, allowing each color (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to have up to 256 possible values.
- U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 is the color profile. What’s a color profile, you ask? What a great segue into the next section…
Color profiles
(my apologies to anyone who knows color theory, this is both overly simplified and probably a bit wrong)
Remember how the pixels on your screen are comprised on red, green, and blue components? What are the chances that every single screen, including your own, have perfectly balanced vibrancy and are perfectly pure colors? Given the extremely low chances of getting it perfect, color profiles are used to both balance out the monitor’s colors and to create common reference points for images to look the same on different screens. The same basic concept exists for printers, just think ink instead of light.
For RGB, things are relatively simple, as efforts to balance colors on screens are fairly recent. The sRGB color space was developed in the 1990s as a “lowest common denominator” for colors shown on a CRT monitor (and the practically identical BT.709 was developed for HDTV). This became the standard for the Internet as well, and as such, almost all RGB images you’ll come across are sRGB – and if an image doesn’t have a color profile defined, it can be assumed to be sRGB. While there are some other RGB color spaces, like Adobe RGB, ProPhoto, and the expanded scRGB, these likely won’t matter to you unless you’re deep into the world of color theory.
CMYK, however…
The messy world of CMYK profiles
While RGB is simple enough that Wikipedia has a nice comparison table, they don’t even attempt to list out common CMYK color spaces. There are far more CMYK profiles in active use than RGB, and this is primarily because CMYK color matching has been around for a lot longer. Not only did efforts to standardize CMYK outputs begin prior to the electronic age, but computers were color matching in print before they were color matching on screen. In addition, as graphics can be printed on a variety of materials and those materials interact with color differently, there are specific profiles for the print medium (e.g. coated vs. uncoated paper).
The closest parallel we have to sRGB in the CMYK realm is the profile we saw above: U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2. Dating from the turn of the millennium, this is the default CMYK in most graphic design software… depending on where you live.
Regional standards
You may have noticed the “U.S.” in the U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 profile name, and this does indeed stand for the United States. While SWOP’s color space is not solely used in the United States, there are other profiles that have been commonly used elsewhere in the world. These include (using abbreviated or organization names for brevity):
- Europe: Euroscale, FOGRA/ISO
- Japan: DIC, Japan Color, JPMA
Profiles by SWOP (and another alliance, GRACoL) are gaining in popularity, but old habits die hard. At time of writing, U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 is generally the default in North America, FOGRA39 is generally the default in Europe, and Japan Color 2001 Coated is generally the default in Japan.
This couldn’t be our issue, could it? After all, Affinity showed that the Pikachu file uses U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, right?
Unprofiled images
Remember how for RGB, I stated that “if an image doesn’t have a color profile defined, it can be assumed to be sRGB”? Well, given all the different profiles for CMYK, this can’t really be true here… but image editing software needs something to be able to work with an image.
Let’s open our Pikachu file again, and – wait, what’s this?
Seems like this PSD doesn’t have an embedded profile, and so Affinity is just picking my default (U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, since I’m in the United States). Someone opening this file in another country might see something different with the exact same file!
A Tale of Two Pikachu
As Pokémon originates in Japan, let’s assign the profile as Japan Color 2001 Coated. After converting that to sRGB:
That’s pretty close to what Pokemon.co.jp shows!
Interestingly, the Pokemon.com Pokédex image doesn’t match any of the regional defaults. After some guess-and-checking, I settled on U.S. Web Uncoated v2:
Here’s a slider comparison between the two, ordered like the Pokédex comparison at the top of the article (U.S. Web Uncoated v2 on left, Japan Color 2001 Coated on right):
What’s correct?
The short answer: we don’t know! These aren’t even the only profiles that Pokémon has used: looking through all of the profiled Pokémon PSD files I’ve got, Japan Color 2001 Coated is definitely the most common, but U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 has a sizable share (particularly around the Sun and Moon era, though it’s inconsistent). A dozen or so other profiles fill out the rest, ranging from a “basic” SWOP profile for many Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire images (some predate Japan Color 2001 Coated, so obviously couldn’t use that) to Euroscale to the newer Japan Color 2011 Coated to even more obscure profiles like TOYO Kaleido V5.0. Interestingly, none use U.S. Web Uncoated v2 – perhaps some graphic designer at TPCi has that set as their default!
Without knowing the whole process taken by Pokémon/GAME FREAK/etc., it’s hard to know which website has the (s)RGB representation intended by Pokémon’s creative team, if either is even “correct”. Perhaps they’re both correct and are simply regional forms! 😅
Thank you to Moonboy65 for the heads-up that using the Japan Color 2001 Coated profile seemed to match the Pokemon.co.jp images, that led me down the series of rabbit holes that resulted in this article!