CMYK to Pantone Approximator
Enter a CMYK, HEX, RGB, or LAB color value and instantly find the closest Pantone Solid Coated match using Delta-E color science. No Pantone subscription needed. Nothing uploaded.
Enter a second color to measure their ΔE distance:
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Learn more: how the Pantone match is calculated
The match is a distance calculation
Pantone Solid Coated colors are mixed ink formulas rather than CMYK recipes, so there is no exact table to look your color up in. This tool converts whatever you enter into CIE L*a*b* and measures the straight-line distance from it to each Pantone swatch it stores.
That distance is Delta-E CIE76: the square root of the squared differences in L*, a*, and b*. Results are sorted smallest first, so the top card is the nearest swatch in the library rather than a guaranteed ink match.
The built-in library holds 131 Pantone Solid Coated entries covering the yellows, oranges, reds, pinks, purples, blues, teals, greens, browns, grays and blacks that most print work draws on. It is a working subset of the full Pantone book, so an unusual shade may have no close neighbor here even when one exists on paper.
Reading the Delta-E score
The badge under the swatches sorts each result into one of four bands. Delta-E of 2 or below is labeled Excellent, up to 5 is Good, up to 10 is Approximate, and anything higher is Poor.
Below about 1, two colors are effectively identical to the eye. Enter CMYK 0 / 20 / 100 / 0 and you get 116 C at Delta-E 1.66, with 109 C just behind at 1.83, so either would be hard to tell from the input on press.
Why saturated process colors score badly here
The CMYK tab uses the plain arithmetic conversion with no press profile behind it, so 100 / 0 / 0 / 0 becomes pure #00FFFF on screen. No mixed Pantone ink is anywhere near that saturated, and the closest stored entry is 3252 C at Delta-E 21.41, which lands in the Poor band.
Flat black behaves the same way. CMYK 0 / 0 / 0 / 100 converts to #000000, and the nearest match is Black 6 C at Delta-E 8.87, because Pantone's blacks are very dark neutrals with a slight cast rather than absolute zero.
A high score on an input like that says more about the screen-space conversion than about your press. If your print profile gives you a measured L*a*b* or hex value for the color, enter that on the LAB or HEX tab and the result becomes far more meaningful.
FAQ
Does this show the CMYK breakdown of the Pantone match it finds?
No. The stats panel reports your input color's L*, a* and b* values, the best Delta-E, the match quality band, and the nearest CSS named color. The tool runs one direction only: your color goes in, the nearest Pantone swatches come out.
The library is Coated only, so what do I do for uncoated stock?
Use the result as a starting point and check the matching U swatch on paper before committing to a run. A proofing study published by proofing.de measured how closely individual Pantone Solid colors could be reproduced and reported per-color deviations from 0.89 Delta-E for Pantone 100 C up to 7.93 Delta-E for Pantone 804 C, with uncoated versions often deviating more than their coated counterparts.
Why does another converter give a different PMS number for the same input?
Converters differ in which slice of the Pantone library they carry and in what they assume when turning CMYK into L*a*b*. The formula matters too: this tool uses Delta-E CIE76, and a tool using CIEDE2000 weights the same gap differently, which can reorder the top results.