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[jitterbug]

Okay, so my educational background (Photography/Illustration/Design) has not been a particularly technical one. I've just taken on what I thought would be a very simple job of finding CMYK/RGB/Web colours for a number of given pantones to be used in branding.

I thought, in my innocence, that I would simply pick each colour in Photoshop (for example), go to the picker, and copy down the different values from there. (I know and accept, of course, that it can be difficult to get an exact visual match for certain colours.) However, I noticed that the numerical values I got this way varied a little from the example given with the job.

Then, I found a couple of examples from Pantone's Color Bridge book; I tried (in Illustrator this time) picking the colours I had found and then converting them to CMYK, to see how close they came to the 'official' conversions. The answer is, not very.
One example: Pantone 1767C. Illustrator found: C-0/M-27/Y-12/K-0.
Color Bridge has this as: C-0/M-32/Y-10/K-0.
Photoshop thinks it's: C-0/M-38/Y-9/K-0 (!!!)
This is enough to make quite a marked difference.

What I do not understand is the inconsistency. Surely if Pantone is an industry standard, then there should be a set of standard values for RGB/CMYK/Web that are simply pre-loaded into software such as CS3 etc. Why the variation..?!

I've tried looking around on the web, and I'm just getting a migraine. I cannot find a simple answer to my question: why are they all different, and how does this work?

If you had this job, then how would you attempt to find the values?

Many thanks in advance...