Like its predecessor, the PANTONE solid to process guide, PANTONE color bridge displays a solid PANTONE Color and its four-color counterpart side-by-side. In addition to being developed using a digital process, the book itself is now significantly larger, as is each individual color swatch. And it is printed on a brighter, more durable paper stock.
The key impetus to creating a new guide was to make it "better" -- to improve the printed product and enhance the four-color representations of PANTONE Colors. Although printing color has recently been referred to in terms of "color management," the truth is that color is one area of the printing process destined to remain subjective. Every individual perceives color a little differently and so many variables come into play -- ink density, press and proof calibration, paper stock, temperature and humidity, dot gain, screen angles, and many others -- true perfection is probably something that can never be attained. But, PANTONE color bridge is an attempt to get closer to that goal by helping you get better control of your PANTONE Colors. The new guide is a long step in that direction.
A simple idea -- but not so simple to implement, because the printing process itself is not perfect. The same ink color can look very different on different paper stocks and will naturally print brighter on coated stock than uncoated. And most importantly, as four-color process printing became commonplace, many of the colors in the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® Publications simply could not be matched with process color inks. It was physically impossible. In modern color management terminology, some of the solid colors are "out of gamut" of the CMYK color spectrum and a perfect match was (and still is) physically impossible.
Pantone responded to this by printing the first PANTONE Process Color Simulator in 1982. The intent was to show the closest available matches to established PANTONE Colors using CMYK inks.
The possible color matches were severely limited because standard screen tint packages commonly used by printing companies came only in 5% increments. Pantone worked with screen manufacturers to develop a unique 26-step screen tint system labeled A-Z, designed to take into account the limitations of the human eye, which does not see color in a linear fashion. This accounts for the somewhat odd percentages (including fractions) found in the early books. The PANTONE Process Color Simulator provided a closer color match and also provided the screen manufacturers with a way to sell more screens.
Pantone updated its book in 1990 (called the PANTONE Process Color Imaging Guide), by increasing the line screen from 133 to 150 and produced the book using digital imagesetters to more accurately demonstrate the process color result using a laser-generated dot pattern. The A-Z screen tint percentages remained the same to provide compatibility with the software applications.
The first thing you will notice when viewing the new PANTONE color bridge guide is that there is improved accuracy in the reproduction of many of the PANTONE Colors with CMYK equivalents. The truth is, over 95% percent of the formulas have been altered in the new guides to achieve this improvement. Pantone’s team used color management software to arrive at the specific color combinations and numbers for the formulas, and also visually evaluated every color and adjusted each of the 1,089 individual color matches further when necessary.
That may seem like a lot of trouble for what might be a very small improvement. But the whole concept of PANTONE color bridge is to create as accurate a color match to the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM Colors as printing technology and the variables of process printing allow. The net result is a closer match to the vast majority of colors in the PANTONE color bridge compared to previous editions. And for many of them, the color simulation is markedly improved.
The merits of using PANTONE color bridge aren’t really changed by color management technology. There is no doubt color management has improved greatly over the last few years and Pantone took advantage of state-of-the-art technology to improve the guide. But for most people in the "real world," color management is not the automatic plug-and-play tool some would like it to be. There are too few people who understand how to apply ICC profiles and too many who use color management incorrectly. Incorrectly applied profiles can be much worse than no color management at all.
But even when you go by the numbers and do everything correctly, color management is still an imperfect tool. While we have come a long way toward putting the specialized viewing traits of the human eye into software, there is still a subjective quality to color that computers have problems discerning. Further, ICC profiles and color matching engines do not factor in the peculiarities in different parts of color space, thereby making absolute colorimetric conversions impossible. Pantone engineers’ own experience creating the new guides is a case in point. Although the very best available technology and printing conditions were used, it was still necessary to "tweak" many colors after viewing them with the human eye.
Because PANTONE color bridge is visual, portable and an industry standard, it is certainly the best tool for selecting and matching colors. What could be a more reliable source of determining color than seeing that color in as close an approximation of its final form -- print -- as possible? The guide can be viewed under any lighting conditions, and the user can be assured that the up-to-date PANTONE Guide at the Chicago design studio will match the same edition used by the printer in Los Angeles and the buyer in New York.
And there’s one other point: PANTONE Color Guides are often used by designers to select "just the right color." PANTONE color bridge gives an instantaneous answer to the question: What will the CMYK color transformation "do" to the color I pick? And it instantly tells designers when a transformation can't give them the results they want. For many designers, having an ink-on-paper version of the color they can hold in their hand, place on top of a product, and carry in their briefcase is the ultimate form of color management. It also serves as the designer’s "contract for color" with the printer.
Ah, the trials of CMYK printing! The process ink pigments, unfortunately, have a very small color gamut -- much smaller than your RGB computer monitor and much smaller than the human eye can see. In fact, process ink pigments can only reproduce about 50% of solid PANTONE Colors. It is simply impossible to reproduce a wide variety of colors using the pigments in process color inks. Once you have solid red and solid yellow, you can’t make the color any "redder." You could run the density up on the printing press, but that would affect all of the images and could cause printing problems. Bright oranges, extremely saturated colors, pastels and fluorescent colors are a problem when printing with standard process color ink as these are out-of-gamut colors.
PANTONE color bridge cannot expand the gamut of process color inks. The intent of the guide is to show the person selecting the PANTONE Color -- as closely as possible -- how the color will actually print in process inks on the finished product, allowing for an informed decision as to whether the solid PANTONE Color can be printed as process or not.
On the other hand, you will notice that many of the colors in the new PANTONE color bridge guide are closer to the solid PANTONE Color than previous editions. Although the color spectrum of the inks we are dealing with is the same, a digital workflow including the ability to select screen tints for each color in 1% increments, brighter papers, printing plates with slightly less dot gain, and the slightly higher standard ink densities being commonly used, has allowed the guide’s engineers to improve many of the color matches.
This is a bit of a Catch-22. Pantone made new and better formulas for many colors, and they will reproduce better on press, but the new improved color may not match the old color that you and your customer have accepted for years. In some cases, consistency is preferable to color fidelity.
Of course, it is quite possible to use the old formulas and tables if that is more appropriate. Pantone understood that there is an issue of legacy art, so the new PANTONE color bridge libraries supplement and co-exist with the earlier PANTONE solid to process libraries. This way, the user can choose whichever is more appropriate.
Many of the most common desktop illustration and page layout programs license the PANTONE Libraries and make them available as digital color libraries in their applications. These include all of the Adobe CS product line (Adobe® Illustrator®, AdobePhotoshop and Adobe InDesign®), QuarkXPress"!, CorelDRAW® and Macromedia® FreeHand®. As it is not possible for all software companies to update their programs simultaneously, it is difficult to know what versions of these programs will come with the new PANTONE color bridge libraries. To solve this issue, the new libraries (PANTONE CMYK PC and PANTONE CMYK EC) can be downloaded from the Pantone Web site at www.pantone.com.
Pantone has a comprehensive manual for installing the libraries into a wide variety of desktop applications. The manual also gives detailed instructions for opening libraries from within programs. The manual is called the PANTONE color bridge Digital Library User Guide and may be downloaded at www.pantone.com.
There is one more thing to keep in mind. The PANTONE Naming convention is to add a suffix to the PANTONE Color to indicate what might be called the "output intent" of the color. Over the years, the following suffixes have been used:
U = uncoated paper
C = coated paper
M = matte paper
CV = computer video (electronic simulation)
CVU = computer video - uncoated
CVC = computer video - coated
(CV, CVU and CVC are no longer used)
The suffixes PC and EC are for solid to process conversions and were used in the prior versions of the PANTONE solid to process libraries
PC = PROCESS COATED
EC = EURO COATED
There can be little doubt of the merits of the new PANTONE color bridge. The bigger guides, bigger swatches, better color matches, and included RGB and HTML values combine to make PANTONE color bridge a new industry standard from a company that has been setting the standard in color for decades.
A few things to remember: most (about 98%) of the formulas are different, and you need to be aware that yesterday’s PANTONE 466 PC is not the same as today’s version. You must make a decision if a better match to the color swatch is more important, or matching something you printed a year ago is critical. (Please note: the "PC" suffix means we are talking about the process simulation of PANTONE 466 C).
Make sure you know how to deal with mapping colors and how your RIP will respond to the potential of different suffixes of the formulas -- keeping in mind that the formula for PANTONE 466 PC is not the same as the formula for PANTONE 466 CVC.
For more than 40 years, Pantone has been providing color-matching solutions for the design and print industry and the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM has been an industry standard for as long as most printers can remember. The new PANTONE color bridge guide provides a significant improvement in the way designers and printers communicate color in the digital age. With the information provided here to steer you around potential problems, printers and designers will be able to use this new guide to improve the finished product. And that is everyone’s goal.
In the world of print design and production, there are many levels of expertise with color management and a wide divergence in the level of understanding of the printing process. Even printers are sometimes confused about when and how to apply color profiles and how to use the basic calibration equipment. At the same time, many designers are understandably interested in making the best looking printed piece possible, and sometimes don’t know that the way they are producing files hurts the chances of getting it to output correctly. As many times as the accusations have been thrown around, it is not true that designers stay up nights trying to make problems for printers, or that printers are taking every opportunity available to them to ruin the designer’s project.
One thing should be clear from the outset. The problems with color specifications that the PANTONE color bridge guide solves only apply to CMYK workflows. The new product neither has any magical properties to solve other color problems nor does it add any new issues to the mix.
The key to getting good output is to understand the potential problems so they can be avoided. The bottom line? You should not apply a profile to a PANTONE Color specified to print in CMYK color space. But there are other considerations too.
There is a potential problem with some output devices when your RIP sees all of the different PANTONE Suffix versions as different colors. With spot colors, the RIP could map each iteration of the color to a separate plate unless the RIP has built-in tools for remapping the color or the user can manually edit the color suffix specifications within the original application. Some RIPS do a good job of mapping the colors correctly and others do not.
Although current versions of most applications have done away with the CV, CVC and CVU suffixes (the C, M and U suffixes replaced them five years ago), many legacy files use the old naming conventions. And designers are still generating files using older programs that in turn use older naming conventions. Although software upgrades could eliminate the problem, prepress operators frequently encounter files where elements on a single page may have the color PANTONE 485 specified as PANTONE 485 CVC, PANTONE 485 C and PANTONE 485 U. There are still many RIPs that will map each of these colors to separate channels, thinking they are actually different colors. While Pantone has licensed many RIP vendors to automatically map all of these colors to a single color channel, and many vendors have included the ability to manually map the colors correctly, the potential for problems remains.
The Pantone-licensed RIPs have Pantone-approved Lab values and typically when a PANTONE Color comes through the data stream, the RIP uses the Lab data for the PANTONE Color. Most of these RIPs deal pretty effectively with the variety of suffixes.
But there is another problem. Many designers simply don’t use the color libraries correctly, selecting PANTONE 485 C where a process simulation of PANTONE 485 is intended. In fact, programs like Adobe Illustrator will allow you to assign a PANTONE Library Color like PANTONE 485 C and specify it as a spot color, or to specify PANTONE 485 C to print as a process color. While this can be handy for the designer, it can play havoc with the production end of the process.
Here's what can happen: All too often, a designer will specify a spot color in an application, even though that color will ultimately be printed with CMYK inks. Then the designer may go back and tell the program it really is a CMYK color, or the pre-press technician may convert all of the spot colors. The software program will use its library to make the conversion. For example, you have a background color panel in QuarkXPress 4. To create the panel, the designer goes to the PANTONE Color Library and selects PANTONE 466, and then clicks the CMYK button so it does not print as a spot color. The same designer has a CMYK image created in Adobe Photoshop CS and wants the background of the image to match the background created in QuarkXPress. Logically, the designer might go to the PANTONE 466 color palette in Adobe Photoshop CS and fill the background with that color. When the photo does not blend in with the background image, the designer wants to know what the prepress operator did to destroy the file! Why don't they match?
As you have already guessed, it is because the color formulas for PANTONE 466 are not the same in QuarkXPress 4 as they are in Adobe Photoshop CS, the reason being that older versions of some software applications might not be using the updated data sets. Simply reading the CMYK values would show this quickly enough, but sometimes these problems are missed until it is too late. To avoid this, users should always check the CMYK values, or make sure that all applications have the same CMYK builds for process simulations of PANTONE Colors. Registered users can download updated palette files for most popular applications from the Pantone Web site free of charge.
A common problem also occurs when creating duotones in Adobe Photoshop where some of the Photoshop versions use "PANTONE Black" as the default name to define the black channel instead of simply naming the color "Black." Again, this can cause problems with the RIP, assigning a separate color to the PANTONE Black channel. The simple fix is to make sure the black printer on a duotone is named "Black" rather than using the default name. The color can easily be renamed in the duotone dialogue box in Adobe Photoshop.
Perhaps the biggest pitfall to avoid is the fact that PANTONE 466 PC using PANTONE color bridge does not use the same formula as PANTONE 466 PC using the old PANTONE solid to process color guide. While the new formula will undoubtedly get you a closer match to the solid PANTONE 466 color swatch, it will not match the color you printed on the same job a year ago using the old libraries. It is important to consider whether matching a previously printed job is more important than matching the color swatch.
Using color management and color profiles in programs like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign can actually change the values of colors. When the profile or rendering intent is changed, the ink percentages also change, which effectively means colors keyed to a PANTONE Formula will change along with them.
While that may appear to be an error, profiles are intended to adjust the input from any source to match the specific output printer. The values must be changed to match the actual output. After all, you don’t want to print a specific dot percentage so much as you want to attain a spectral match on the finished product. Of course, the real question is: "What data does my RIP actually use?" As noted, Pantone-licensed RIPs use the Lab data for the color. You’ll need to know how your RIP actually deals with the file.
When you profile a printer, you are not measuring dots at all, but using a spectrophotometer to measure the saturation and hue characteristics of that printer. Since all printers and presses have different printing characteristics, selecting colors by dot percentages and ink density is really a poor way to do it. Remember that the formulas Pantone uses to match colors are derived from spectral readings and the dot size equivalent is computed from that reading, not the other way around. When output is done to a CTP device according to a press profile, it is almost certain the dot percentages will not be the same as the formula. This is normal. Even though the guide shows the user a color in terms of dot percentages, it is a color we are trying to match, not a dot. The color profile will adjust the dot to best match the desired color on press.
But even if they should be using a spectrophotometer on press, in the real world of printing, a lot of folks are still reading ink dot percentages and ink densities to "control" color. Chasing dot size is a good way to ruin a print job.
To prove it to yourself, try this test. To keep it simple, use the program you are most familiar with such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign. Create a 4" x 4" window and fill it with 100% PANTONE 466. Then apply different color profiles to it. Use the eyedropper or info tool to check how the dot percentages of the color block will shift, sometimes dramatically depending on how different your profiles are.
Color profiles are designed for a specific output device and should only be applied on final output to that device. It is fine to view a photo in the output profile so you can see what the output device will do to the image, but if you actually apply that profile, you are already creating the color transformation. If your RIP recognizes the profile, it should not make the transformation again, but there are problems that can occur here too. The RIP may have its own library of PANTONE Colors and may pull the data from those libraries and replace the data from the native file. This is another place where you need to ensure the proper PANTONE Libraries are installed.