If you’re still confused about the difference between the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM and the PANTONE Goe System, then this tip should shed some light.
Daniel Dejan, North American ETC Print and Creative Manager for Sappi Fine Paper, recently presented the PaperSpecs Webinar Mind Your Color and in a follow-up interview with Sabine Lenz, founder of PaperSpecs, explained in more detail how the two systems relate to each other and why this is important to you.
Sabine Lenz: How much does Goe Pantone expand the CMYK hexagon?
Daniel Dejan: Released in September 2008, the PANTONE Goe system has been a very interesting project for Pantone. Essentially, Pantone wanted to rebuild its system. When that occurred, several things happened. First, it made the Pantone book chromatic.
If you know the Pantone book, you know that the Pantone book has red in two places. It’s got blue in a couple of places. Then you have some grays. It’s confusing. This is the first time that when you fan it out, it really follows chromatically. So all the reds are in one place followed by the yellows and the oranges, etc. It’s a brilliant system.
They changed the ink sets slightly in what used to be in the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. Before, they essentially used 14 inks plus black. They are now able to do with far less. Essentially, it is 10 inks plus black. What made it so unusual is that they were able, through this new system, to literally double the colors. They went from the old Pantone Matching System, which was 1,114 colors to the new Goe system, which is 2,058 – incredibly impressive.
Pantone did change some of the basics of their color system. The one thing that changed, which is probably the most difficult for the design community, was the numbering system. The numbering system works has a number of different color families. It’s a three-number system. The first number is in the color family 1-164. The second number is what page it is in the color family, so there can be anything from one page to seven pages. The other part is what number is that color on the actual page itself.
The interesting part of the book is in the old PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM, the color family was right in the middle. Then if you look at the page, what happens is that it went three steps white going up and then three steps black going down.
In this system, basically, you have the color at the bottom and then you have six steps of a clear extender. That will change the whole game, to be honest with you, because one of the things that we always talk about – and this is particularly interesting from a PaperSpecs perspective – is that if you, in fact, change the use of opaque white to a clear extender, what happens is you’re actually using the paper white to dilute the saturation of the color.
Of course, that begs the large question, what happens if it’s a blue-white sheet? What happens if you’re on a sheet that has got a bit of yellow in it or a bit of pink? You’d be very amazed, by the way. If you look at the paper and if you actually look at the scientific color build of what we think of as white, we all know that paper companies add blue dye to make papers look whiter and brighter. But they also add very light touches of yellow, very light touches of red, very light touches of green to be able to get a certain, very nuanced cast to their paper or to give you what we call a bone white, or an ecru white, or a soft white.
You see this particularly in uncoated paper, but it’s very much also the case in coated papers. When you take swatchbooks and you look at Appleton versus NewPage versus Sappi versus IP versus West Linn, you’ll notice that we all make white paper, but boy, there are a lot of shades of white.
So to go back to the original question, first of all, the Goe ink system is an evolution of the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. You might have noticed that it has been around, but it really has not caught on. It’s a brilliant system, don’t get me wrong. Here’s what I really recommend: if you ever, ever have the chance to see the software that comes with the Goe system, it is brilliant. I have never seen anything like it.
This really is the influence of X-rite and Pantone working together, very scientific approach to color. In the software on your monitor, if you pick a color, it will cross-reference it back to the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. So if you love Pantone 185 or 217 or 314, if you simply type in a Pantone Matching System number or a Goe number, it will give you the equivalent of the other system.
Here’s the amazing advantage: in the software, it will actually give you the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM, the Goe number, and then it will give you the RGB equivalent, the sRGB, the Adobe 1998 RGB, the CMYK equivalent build or the closest possible, and also all the different cross-references for the other numbers.
Here’s to answer the question “How much has the PANTONE Goe system expanded the CMYK hexagon?” It has literally doubled the amount of spot colors that the Pantone system from PMS to Goe. From a CMYK build, we can only replicate about 30 percent of the Pantone colors in CMYK using the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. Now we only can build about 40 percent of the Goe colors in CMYK. So, it really didn’t impact it that much.
SL: So what you’re basically saying is we still can only print so much CMYK. It hasn’t really affected the CMYK well or expanded the hexagon.
DD: It hasn’t expanded the CMYK hexagon. More importantly, you’re still going to need a bridge. In fact, they have created a Goe bridge book. Now this is the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. Now they have created a Goe bridge to show you the Goe color spot-to-process build and how close you can get.
The beauty of it is, of course, you’ve got 2,058 colors to choose from now. They’ve doubled the spot color palette for you to choose from. It doesn’t impact the CMYK gamut. It does impact how many colors can you build using CMYK that are in the PANTONE Goe book.
