Pantone Goe - 2,058 new spot colours, so how will you print them?

A couple of weeks after the news that Pantone is being acquired by X-Rite came the announcement of the first all-new Pantone colour system for 45 years. It’s called Goe and is an entirely separate system to the original Pantone Matching System (PMS), which Pantone claims will also continue to be sold for the foreseeable future.

Doris Brown, vp marketing at Pantone USA, says that Pantone consulted with designers and printers during the almost four years it took to develop Goe. What designers asked for was more colours, she says. So Goe offers 2,058 colours, roughly double those of PMS. The extra colours are heavy on the blues, which are what modern businesses like most, apparently. The initial Pantone Goe system is sold in a cubic plastic box containing three components: the GoeGuide, a fan-out colour selection booklet; ; GoeSticks, peel-off adhesive-backed colour chips; and myPantone Mac/Windows software for choosing colours and creating palettes. The Goe system should be available in the UK pretty well now. In the US the price is $499, but UK dealers are speculating gloomily that it may be more like £350 over here because of what they will be charged, which seems rather steep. Goe’s completely new three-part numbering reference system works more logically than PMS. It’s based on 165 full-strength colours that form a continuous spectrum if you spread them out in one of the familiar Pantone fan books. Each full-strength colour is the basis of a colour ‘family’ of several pages of related colours within the book. So the number Pantone 16-4-1 C for instance means the colour can be found in the base family colour 16, on the fourth page of that family, in the number 1 position on that page. The C means coated paper.

The problem, though Pantone doesn’t see it as one, is that Goe’s 2,038 colours don’t necessarily incorporate all of the 1,000-odd colours of PMS. This means that the there may not an exact match for a particular PMS reference number within Goe, though you can bet you’ll find one that’s pretty close. However, ‘pretty close’ won’t cut much ice with a big global brand that has always specified its house colours in PMS and can’t find an exact Goe equivalent. “Big brands are the 800 lb gorilla,” Brown admits. “If, say, Coca Cola says that its red is going to be in PMS, who’s going to argue with it?”

Therefore, Pantone is keeping PMS. So instead of a new, better system replacing the old PMS, printers will have to support both. This seems like a missed opportunity to produce a single rationalised system. Still, considered on its own, Goe is a useful innovation. It has been developed to reflect changes in technology since the introduction of PMS in 1962/3, in particular the need to display colours on computer screen in websites and other media.

It’s evident that this is a system for designers first, and printers will just have to live with it. As with PMS, it’s not primarily designed for colour matching by process printing colours (ie CMYK). Pantone is presenting it as a spot colour printing system, like PMS, where every colour can be mixed from a base set of Pantone-specified and licensed ink, and printed that way. Unlike the 14 base inks of PMS though, Goe only needs ten.

This is all fine and dandy for offset, screen or flexo processes that can run fifth, six or any other number of spot colours. However most digital printers, whether toner or inkjet, can’t accept user-mixed spot colours. HP Indigo liquid ink digital presses are the only exception. Digital printers will have to rely on electronic colour separation systems that can transform the Goe colours into the nearest matches achievable by their particular colour ink/toner sets. Already a crop of third party software developers have announced future support for Goe. Quark will add it to the palettes of XPress 7 and Corel says it will support it too, presumably for Corel Draw.

Several Pre-press Rip makers and proofing suppliers have said they’ll add built-in separation tables for Goe values – these include Agfa, Founder, CGS, Codeline, DuPont, EFI, Esko-Artwork, Global Graphics (Harlequin), GMG, ICS and Onyx Graphics. It’ll also be supported by digital printer makers including HP, NexPress, Xeikon and Xerox. Meantime, current Rips will be able to handle Goe colours within documents, because they’ll pick up the LAB values and separate from those.

Significant by its absence so far is Adobe, which hasn’t announced support for Goe in Creative Suite 3, which rather puts Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash and DreamWeaver users up the spout until it does. Adobe won’t be able to stand aloof for long. In the meantime Pantone has a solution for Adobe users, but it’ll cost real money, unlike the third party upgrades, which will either be free, or at least buried in the normal upgrade cycle.

That solution is the myPantone palette software, for Mac OS X or Windows. This is a small colour specification utility that will operate like a floating Widget menu over any other application. So far it is only available as part of the complete $499 Goe system. Doris Brown says that Pantone is considering selling myPantone separately, but hasn’t decided yet. MyPantone will allow the creation of colour palettes that can be exported for use with graphics applications such as the Adobe Creative Suite. It will include colour picker menus that will convert practically any colour into Goe values – most significantly LAB (which covers the whole human vision colour space) and Adobe RGB 1998 or sRGB (which are more restricted colour spaces mainly used for digital cameras, scanners and monitors). It will also offer eyedropper samplers so you can capture and read off a Goe value for any colour displayed in an on-screen application, and save it into a palette.

The Goe reference books don’t yet directly address the needs of printers who are obliged to use process colour separations because they can’t print spot colours. Only the myPantone palette and third party Rip/driver separators can do this. So far there is no Goe equivalent of the PMS Color Bridge books, which give the closest CMYK values for European offset inks for each PMS value, though it’s pretty obvious that a Goe equivalent will appear eventually. Even if a Goe Color Bridge book appears soon, it will only give CMYK values for offset presses. Most digital printers, especially inkjets, have a wider gamut than offset so they’ll be able to match more Goe colours. Eddy Hagen, MD of VIGC (The Flemish Innovation Centre for Graphic Communication) in Belgium, has identified what he thinks is a serious error in the spot colour printed guides, and published an open letter to Pantone pointing this out.

Each colour in the Pantone Goe books is printed alongside an RGB colour value for on-screen or colour separation use. Hagen points out that Pantone doesn’t specify which RGB is used in the books. Pantone’s published specifications show that it is sRGB, which is widely used by consumer cameras, scanners and monitors, but it’s relatively restricted in gamut. 

Professional photographers and designers as well as pre-press operators are often advised to use widergamut Adobe RGB 1998. Hagen took some of the Pantone RGB values and processed them through sRGB and Adobe RGB in Photoshop, and got very different results, which he shows on his website at www.graphicbrain.com/pantonegoe (there are English as well as Flemish pages).

“sRGB is missing a lot of colours that we can print with ISO coated,” Hagen says. Adobe 1998 has far less of a problem. Pantone’s response is that if this bothers you then you should use the myPantone palette utility. This defaults to sRGB but lets you switch to Adobe RGB (or HTML for websites) so hopefully problems won’t arise if you stick to choosing Goe colours via software. Hagen says that Pantone ought to make it clear by changing the printed books to read ‘sRGB’ instead of ‘RGB’ and by easily identifying which colour space is being used In myPantone palettes. Here at Image Reports I was able to duplicate Hagen’s results, which do indeed show a significant difference between sRGB and Adobe 1998 for ‘out-of- CMYK-gamut’ colours in Photoshop. I also checked out the correlation between sRGB, Adobe RGB and some wide gamut printer profiles such as the HP Designjet Z3100, and saw some big mismatches where the printer can reproduce Goe values that sRGB and even Adobe RGB will ‘clip’ and not send them. The answer is to stick to original ‘spot’ values for Goe (or indeed PMS), and then print via a Goe-compatible Rip or driver, or failing that to use LAB, as this will allow for the entire gamut of any digital printer.

MyPantone will also let you enter a PMS number and it will suggest the nearest equivalent Goe value. It’ll also predict how close the match will be by expressing a Delta-E value, which shows the difference between the two in a colour space. The closer a PMS-Goe Delta-E gets to 1.0, the less customers will notice any mismatch, especially if they don’t have a ‘real’ PMS sample to compare it with.

“We spent a lot of time talking to designers, printers and specifiers to get to where we are now, and we will take the same approach to derivative products,” says Brown. “We don’t want something that has a short shelf life.”

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