Product Review

Learning to Love Pantone’sNew Color Bridge GuidePantone will make many new friends with its new solid-toprocess color guidebook, dubbed “Color Bridge.” But as with previ-ous product revisions, some customers will moan and gnash theirteeth simply because new formulas for the Pantone Matching SystemCMYK conversions have widespread implications for the day-to-daymanagement of printing jobs.

Vol. 5, No. 3 • May 4, 2005

Seybold365.com

A Seybold Reprint

© 2005 by Seybold Publications, 795 Folsom Street, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94107-1243, ph. (415) 905-2300.All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

The Seybold Report (ISSN: 1533-9211; USPS 020-953). Subscriptions are available in the U.S./Canada for $595 per year and Internationally for $640 per year (24 issues mailed semimonthly).

Product Review

Part of the reason prepress operators andsome designers are less than eager to seePantone’s new Color Bridge process guide-book is the same reason they will want tobuy it: It’s the definitive industry standard

for defining formulas for replicating Pantone Match-ing System (PMS) colors. Nearly every major graphicssoftware publisher licenses Pantone’s color guides andincludes the formulas in their products. That over-whelming popularity is also the source of consterna-tion when changes are made. It’s a lot like when thephone company changes your area code: You knowthey have to do it and that it’s a good thing, but youwish it wasn’t such a hassle when it happens.

The changes are significant enough that Pantonedecided to christen this release with a brand new name,Color Bridge. At first glance, the guide closely resem-bles the book it replaces, and it displays a Pantone solidcolor and its four-color counterpart side by side. Butthe new book is significantly larger, as is each individ-ual color swatch. It is also printed on a brighter, moredurable paper stock and adds both RGB and HTMLdata, in addition to the CMYK color recipe for eachswatch, making it more useful for Web designers.

The most significant changes are more subtle. Pan-tone has used color management software and a com-pletely digital workflow to improve the quality of theCMYK swatches. Pantone also used an all-new, exten-sively calibrated and profiled printing press to provideoptimum accuracy for the solid color swatches in thebook. In the process, some 95%of the color recipes have beenmodified in the new book, and aclose side-by-side comparisonwith the old book shows that thecolor matches are certainlyimproved — in some cases sub-stantially. That, after all, was thekey impetus to creating a newguide: to improve the printedproduct and enhance the four-

color representations of Pantone colors. Color Bridge also demonstrates that Pantone has

recognized that print workflow has changed in recentyears and that the vast majority of printing is nowdone with digital screens, color management systems,finer screen resolutions and brighter papers.

A Little HistoryThe concept of the first Pantone formula guide hasn’tchanged much since its inception nearly half a centuryago. By printing a guide with ink swatches under veryclose tolerances and assigning a number to each colorin the guide, it provided a way for printers, designersand ink manufacturers to communicate color. If thecolor “Pantone 485” looks like the same shade of redin each of these books, the designer, printer and inkmanufacturer all start from the same point and see thesame color.

The original selection of 500 colors has nowgrown to include 1,089 in the Color Bridge guidealone. Pantone also publishes several other guides,including an array of books for the printing industry,as well as guides for other industries, such as cosmeticsand home decorating.

Pantone, of course, faces the same problem everyprinter and designer faces: the many variables thatcome into play when you smear grease on ground-upbits of wood. The printing process itself is just not per-fect. The same ink color can look very different on dif-ferent paper stocks (Flint and other ink companies

Volume 5, Number 3 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies • © 2005 Seybold Publications 5

Learning To Love Pantone’s New Color Bridge Guide

BY STEPHEN BEALS

Pantone will no doubt make many friends with its new solid-to-process guidebook,

dubbed Color Bridge. But as with its previous product revision, some customers

will moan and gnash their teeth simply because new formulas for the Pantone

Matching System CMYK conversions have widespread implications — not all of

them good — for the day-to-day management of printing jobs.

Product Review

publish a book with the exact same ink printed on anumber of different stocks to demonstrate how dra-matically paper stock can affect ink color).

Four-color process printing exacerbates the issuesof color matching. Many of the colors in the Pantonematching system books simply cannot be matchedwith process color inks. In modern color managementterminology, some of the solid colors are “out ofgamut” of the CMYK color spectrum, and a perfectmatch is physically impossible. The first Pantone Imag-ing Guide in 1982 was intended to show the closestavailable matches to established Pantone colors usingCMYK inks.

The Closest SimulationThat color guide effectively demonstrated the differ-ence between solid Pantone colors and the closest sim-ulation of that color achievable with process color inksusing the printing process commonly used at that time.The 1982 edition was printed using 133-line screens,paper stock with much less brightener than is usedtoday and a YMCK ink rotation on the presses that isseldom used now.

The possible color matches were severely limitedbecause standard screen packages commonly used byprinting companies only came in 5% increments. Pan-tone worked with screen manufacturers to develop aunique A-Z screen tint system, designed to take intoaccount the limitations of the human eye, which doesnot see color in a linear fashion. This accounts for thesomewhat odd percentages, including fractions, foundin the early books. The A-Z books presented a closercolor match and provided screen manufacturers with away to sell more screens.

In 1990, Pantone updated its book by increasing

the line screen from 133 to 150, and produced thebook using digital imagesetters to more accuratelydemonstrate the process color result using a laser-gen-erated dot pattern. The A-Z screen tint percentagesremained the same to provide compatibility with thesoftware applications.

If You Use Color Management,Do You Need Color Bridge?Color management has certainly improved greatlyover the past few years, and Pantone took advantageof the superior technology to improve its guide. But formost people in the “real world,” color management isnot the automatic plug-and-play tool some would likeit to be. Many people do not understand how to applyInternational Color Consortium (ICC) profiles, andmany use color management incorrectly. Incorrectlyapplied profiles can be much worse than no color man-agement at all.

Even when color management is done correctly,the human eye, with its subjective perception of color,is the final arbiter of whether color is “correct.” Ironi-cally, the meticulous work the company did to achievebetter formulas highlights some of the weaknesses ofcolor management software. Pantone’s team testedsoftware from several companies to arrive at the spe-cific numbers for the formulas. But even after selectingthe software vendor whose product most closely fit itsneeds, the team also used visual assessments to evalu-ate the colors and found it necessary to “tweak” indi-vidual color matches in many cases to improve thematch.

The Pantone Color Bridge guide — a visual,portable and industry standard measurement tool — isthe favored tool for selecting and matching colors.Since it is an “ink on paper” guide, it’s ideal for pre-dicting color whose final destination is ink on paper.But the critical question Color Bridge answers is howto accurately predict how the CMYK transformationprocess will affect a given color. Of course, knowingwhen a good color match is simply not possible mightnot please the designer, but having that information inadvance is certainly best. For many designers, havingan ink-on-paper version of the color they can hold intheir hand, place on top of a product and carry in abriefcase is the ultimate form of color management.

Real World IssuesThis is where the moaning and gnashing of teethbegins, but it doesn’t have to be a problem. Pantone’snew formulas are noticeably better and will reproducebetter on press, and that’s good. But the differences canlead to unanticipated results for users who are notaware of the changes. Designers and printers who areaware of how these changes affect production canavoid potential problems. For instance, what if you areusing Pantone 466, one of the colors that is consider-ably improved, with a formula that’s much different

6 May 4, 2005 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies

PANTONE®

Solid CMYK

41C M Y K

0120

PANTONE318 PC

R 143 G 223 B 226HTML 8FDFE2

PANTONE318 C

24C M Y K

070

PANTONE317 PC

R 187 G 231 B 230HTML BBE7E6

PANTONE317 C

PANTONE color bridgeNew taller, wider size

Larger color swatches

Modified CMYK screentint percentages

Improved matchesin four-color process

sRGB and HTMLvalue for solid colors

Brighter, moredurable paper

This is what the new Color Bridgeguide looks like.

About an inch and aquarter longer and

a quarter inch widerthan previous

Pantone solid toprocess guides, thenew size allows for

bigger swatches andadditional RGB and

HTML data.

Product Review

from the previous one? If it’s a new job, that has to bea good thing. But suppose it’s a job you’ve printedbefore. Is it more important to match the previousprinting or the swatch book?

You can use the old formulas and tables if that ismore appropriate. Pantone understands the issue oflegacy art, so the new Color Bridge libraries supple-ment and co-exist with the earlier solid-to-processlibraries. This way, the user can choose whichever ismore appropriate. What is critical is knowing that thechanges in the Color Bridge guide can potentiallychange the actual color of the output.

Putting Libraries to UseAs mentioned previously, soft-ware vendors, including theAdobe CS product line (Illustra-tor, Photoshop and InDesign),QuarkXPress, CorelDRAW andMacromedia FreeHand, alllicense the Pantone libraries andmake them available as digitalcolor libraries in their applica-tions. It often takes some time forvendors to update their libraries,and many different versions ofthe libraries will remain in circu-lation for years. You can down-load the new libraries (EuroCoated and Process Coated)from the Pantone Web site atwww.Pantone.com.

Pantone’s comprehensive guide for installing thelibraries into a wide variety of desktop applications,called the Pantone Color Bridge Digital Library UserGuide (available at www.Pantone.com), also providesdetailed instructions for opening libraries from withinprograms.

Also keep in mind that the Pantone naming con-vention is to add a suffix to the Pantone color to indi-cate what might be called the “output intent” of thecolor. The following suffixes have been used over theyears:

U = uncoated paperC = coated paperM = matte paperCV = computer video (electronic simulation)CVU = computer video — uncoatedCVC = computer video — coated (CV, CVU and CVC are no longer used)

The suffixes PC and EC are for solid-to-processconversions and were used in the prior versions of thesolid to process libraries:

PC = Process Coated EC = Euro Coated

Potential Suffix ConfusionIt is important to know how your workflow handlesthe mapping of spot colors. Current versions of mostapplications replaced the old CV, CVC and CVU suf-fixes with C, M and U suffixes five years ago, thoughmany legacy files use the old naming conventions. Anddesigners are still generating files using older programsthat, in turn, use older naming conventions.

Although software upgrades could eliminate thisproblem, prepress operators frequently encounter fileswhere elements on a single page might have the colorPantone 485 specified as Pantone 485 CVC, Pantone485 C and Pantone 485 U. Many RIPs will still mapeach of these colors to separate channels, thinking theyare actually different colors. While a few RIPS auto-

Volume 5, Number 3 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies 7

Pantone used thiscustom-built KBARapida 105 press forthe new guide. It islocated in Pantone’sCarlstadt, N.J.,headquarters.

To make Color Bridge a better guide, Pantone:• used an ink set that conforms to ISO-2846-1 with

strict quality control (QC).• used No. 1 grade 80-pound gloss cover paper

stock (again with strict QC). This paper is bothbrighter and more durable than previous edi-tions.

• achieved optimum printing conditions, then per-formed profiling and maintenance on four-colorpress before production.

• established Lab values for the solid colors, basedon the paper, and then converted those valuesto RGB.

• used current profiling software to generatecolor recipes.

• performed both instrumental and visual QC onevery color, making adjustments whererequired.

• generated digital press proofs and productionpress proofing.

• performed both instrumental and visual QC onpress proofs.

• used a new custom printing press for printingthe solid ink colors. TSR

What’s New?

Product Review

matically map all of these colors to a single color chan-nel, and many vendors have included the ability tomanually map the colors correctly, the potential forproblems remains.

Pantone said the RIP manufacturers that licensePantone libraries use Pantone-approved Lab values,which means that the CMYK output for the variousPantone suffixes will be interpreted the same wayregardless of which suffix is used.

Beware Of Design ShortcutsOther potential problems have more to do with opera-tor carelessness than new color libraries. Many design-ers simply don’t use the color libraries correctly,selecting Pantone 485 C where a process color isintended, for example. In fact, programs such asAdobe Illustrator allow a user to assign a PantoneLibrary color like Pantone 485 PC and specify it as aspot color, or to specify Pantone 485 C to print as aprocess color. Incorrect choices of color space canwreak havoc with output.

Some versions of Adobe Photoshop Duotone cre-ation software use an unfortunate and potentially trou-blesome naming convention. Instead of naming theblack printer in a black-plus-solid-color duotone“black,” the default name is “Pantone Black,” whichcan cause problems with the RIP assigning a separatecolor to the Pantone Black channel.

Potential problems also arise for non-Pantonelicensed RIPs, depending on where the RIP picks up thecolor data for the CMYK conversion. If you have aPantone 466 C from Quark 6, 466 CVC from an Illus-trator 5 EPS file and 466PC from an Illustrator CS file

within the same document, they might separate outusing different formulas. Although the colors would besimilar, there would certainly be some difference ineach rendition of the color.

Pitfalls to AvoidUsing color profiles in programs like Adobe Illustratoror InDesign can change the values of colors. When theprofile or rendering intent is changed, the ink percent-ages also change, which effectively means colors keyedto a Pantone formula will change along with them.While that might appear to be an error, profiles areintended to adjust the input from any source to matchthe specific output printer. The values must be changedto match the actual output. After all, you don’t want toprint a specific dot percentage so much as you want toattain a spectral match on the finished product. Ofcourse, the real question is, what data does my RIPactually use? As noted, Pantone-licensed RIPs use theLab data for the color. You’ll need to know how yourRIP actually deals with the file.

When you profile a printer, you are not measuringdots at all, but instead are using a spectrophotometerto measure the saturation and hue characteristics ofthat printer. Since all printers and presses have differentprinting characteristics, selecting colors by dot percent-ages and ink density is really a poor way to do it.Remember that the formulas Pantone uses to matchcolors are derived from spectral readings and the dotsize equivalent is computed from that reading, not theother way around. When output is done to a CTPdevice according to a press profile, it is almost certainthat the dot percentages won’t be the same as the for-mula, which is normal. Even though the guide showsthe user a color in terms of dot percentages, we are try-ing to match a color, not a dot. The color profile willadjust the dot to best match the desired color on press.

But even if they should be using a spectrophotome-ter on press, in the real world of printing, a lot of peo-ple are still reading ink dot percentages and inkdensities to “control” color. Chasing dot size is a goodway to ruin a print job.

Prove It to YourselfTo prove it to yourself, try this test. Use the programyou are most familiar with, such as Photoshop, Illus-trator or InDesign. Create a 4-by-4-inch window andfill it with 100% Pantone 466 and apply different colorprofiles to it. Use the eyedropper or info tool to checkhow the dot percentages of the color block will shift,sometimes dramatically, depending on how differentyour profiles are.

Color profiles are designed for a specific outputdevice and should only be applied on final output tothat device. It is fine to view a photo in the output pro-file so you can see what the output device will do to theimage, but if you actually apply that profile, you arealready creating the color transformation. If your RIP

8 May 4, 2005 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies

A pressman at the Pantone facility

pulls a sheet forinspection duringtheprinting of the

newly releasedPantone ColorBridge guide.

Product Review

recognizes the profile, it should not make the transfor-mation again, but problems can occur here, too. TheRIP might have its own library of Pantone colors andmight pull the data from those libraries and replace thedata from the native file. This is another place whereyou need to make sure the proper Pantone Librariesare installed.

The bottom line is, you should not apply a profileto a Pantone color specified to print in CMYK colorspace.

Our TakeDesigners and printers will probably express some dis-may regarding the new Pantone Color Bridge, but theyare an improvement and, with proper handling, shouldnot present any obstacles professionals aren’t alreadyaccustomed to handling. Thanks to bigger guides andswatches, better color matches and included RGB andHTML values, the Pantone Color Bridge represents anew industry standard from a company that has beensetting the bar in color for decades.

Still, there are a few things to remember: About95% of the formulas are different, and you need to beaware that yesterday’s Pantone 466 PC (the “PC” suf-fix means we are talking about the process simulationof Pantone 466 C) is not the same as the new version.

You might have to decide between having a bettermatch to the color swatch or matching something youprinted a year ago.

Make sure you know how to deal with mappingcolors and how your workflow might be affected bythe different suffixes found in older application soft-ware as well as the different conversion formulas usedin the libraries. Keep in mind that the formula for Pan-tone 466 PC is not the same as the formula for Pantone466 CVC. And remember that you can download thenew libraries from the Pantone web site.

For more than 40 years, Pantone has providedcolor-matching solutions for the design and printindustry, and the Pantone Matching System has beenan industry standard for as long as most printers canremember. The new Pantone Color Bridge guide pro-vides a significant improvement in the way designersand printers communicate color in the Digital Age.With the information provided here to steer youaround potential problems, printers and designers willbe able to use this new guide to improve their finishedproduct. And that is everyone’s goal.

(Editor’s note: Pantone commissioned a whitepaper on this subject written by Mr. Beals, but did notalter or edit this version for The Seybold Report.)

TSR

Volume 5, Number 3 • The Seybold Report • Analyzing Publishing Technologies 9

There’s a fine line between getting the best possi-ble color match and printing the guide with eas-

ily achievable press settings. Using a standard such asSWOP (Specifications for Web Offset Publications)does not use anywhere near the full extent of thecolor gamut achievable with CMYK inks because bydefinition the standard is an attempt to cover thebroadest range of press printing characteristics. Webpresses in general are built for more speed at theexpense of some degree of quality, and SWOP stan-dards were developed for a broad range of webpresses. To use SWOP for a swatch book used by bothdesigners and sheetfed printers would severely limitthe number of achievable color matches.

GRACoL (General Requirements for Applications inCommercial Offset Lithography) does not use the fullrange possible either, but it does use a considerablywider range than SWOP. The GRACoL standard wasdesigned for sheetfed presses printing an ISO stan-dard ink set, on commercial coated paper stock. Thetarget ink densities are also higher. For this reason,

Pantone adopted the GRACoL standard in printing itsColor Bridge guides.

Because the GRACoL standard is still in develop-ment, Pantone used the current published standardsas the basis for its starting point and published thespecific settings used for printing the book.

Pantone produced its Color Bridge guide in compli-ance with ISO ink standard 2846-1 and where appli-cable, with ISO 12647-2 for printing the halftonedots. Pantone publishes the specific printing condi-tions used in producing the Pantone Color Bridgeguide. All of the technical information is availablefrom Pantone and is also printed here: • screen angles (K 45°, C 15°, M 75° and Y 90°) Euclid-

ean dot, • inks (ISO 2846-1), • paper (No. 1 grade, 80-pound gloss coated cover

stock), • line screen (175 lpi), • target ink densities (K 175%, C 140%, M 145%, Y

100%). TSR

A System That Works in the Real World