Rangefinder Magazine
May 2006

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The Pantone Story by STEVE ANCHELL
Color-matching Mentors

Pantone ColorVANTAGE inks are an optimized set of pigmented inks along with expertly created profiles.

Since my earliest days in photography I can remember hearing the name Pantone® associated with color matching. Indeed, my mentor, Frank Rogers, had a Pantone swatch book in his studio that he used to match the colors of his clients’ fabrics. Later, when I had my own photography studio in Hollywood, I too used Pantone for color matching.

Back then I believed that Pantone was an international standard used by everyone. As it turns out, there are a couple of other regional color systems out there, but the majority of photographers, designers, architects, graphic artists and printers use the Pantone System over any other. What Pantone is about is empowering people with a universal color-communication language, throughout the world, not just one country.

Pantone was established in 1963 by Lawrence Herbert as a method for people in a variety of industries to unambiguously communicate color, rather than using terms like “rose red” or “sky blue.” To accomplish this, Lawrence created a color guidebook, which helps people talk about and “see” the same colors.

At the time, Lawrence worked for a custom printer called Pantone Press in New York City that did color critical color cards for cosmetic companies and for pointof- purchase (POP) applications. He found that every color specification from the design firm was a custom color request. He began to realize that he was matching the same colors over and over again with the same base pigments. That gave him the idea to create a standard system of colors, the Pantone Matching System®.

In the ‘60s there were 500 colors that could be mixed from a base of eight colors. Every ink company thought they had unique colors when in fact they had basically the same and distributed their own color books.

Lawrence promoted his system to all the ink companies, saying, why spend all that time, effort, and money when you could tie into one system? The designers will have one book they can pick from, photographers will have an exact duplicate book, and the printers will have the very same book. All you have to do is supply the ink to the printers.

Eye- One Display LT is an entry-level professional calibration tool.

He sent out 21 letters to ink companies and he got twenty positive responses back. From that humble beginning, and one man’s genius, today Pantone has truly become a global organization with headquarters in New Jersey and offices in the UK, Germany, Hong Kong, China and Japan.

Adobe, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) incorporate the Pantone Color System in their technology. So if you are working in Adobe Photoshop and open the color selector, Pantone Colors will be built in. When you buy an HP or Epson printer, there is a look-up table that supports Pantone Colors.

Other companies, such as Lands End and The Gap, use Pantone for product development. The Pantone textile system® is used to specify the colors of the products that will be manufactured anywhere in the world. They know that if they pick a certain color blue for a shirt, they have the confidence that the people in say, China or Ann Arbor, Michigan, have the expertise and information to match that color.

Pantone serves a number of different markets such as graphic arts—printing, publishing, packaging, graphic design, advertising, virtually anywhere someone is creating in color. They have also established color standards in fashion, home, architecture and interiors. In fact, they are the color standard worldwide for the fashion industry. When fashion designers want color inspiration, they’ll use the Pantone textile products, such as Pantone’s forecasting product, View Colour Planner.

Pantone also deals with industrial design and retail, and most recently made inroads into the consumer market with a color system for plastics. Now, toy designers can spec their colors, and companies like Clariant and GE Plastics can make the material.

Photographers can then match these colors, either on film or in applications such as Photoshop.

Hexachrome is a six-color color-mathcing system that allows you to coordinate color in the film, computer and prepress environment.

It is easy to see the benefits. If you and your client use Pantone, you can see an accurate color appearing all the way through the workflow. A designer could pick a Pantone Color out of a chip book, and there would be markers and papers available in those colors so that they could do their paste-up and sketches using the colors that will finally get photographed and printed.

Seeing that computers would eventually take over the world of graphic arts and printing, Lawrence’s son, Richard, took college courses in computer engineering and interactive computer graphics programming. After college he digitized the Pantone System, created an electronic equivalent of the Pantone Matching System with data values in CMYK for printers and RGB for displays. This system was then licensed to the software companies that emerged with desktop-publishing software, such as Aldus (now Adobe) Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXPress, and to printer manufacturers such as HP, Epson and Xerox.

Using the Pantone System, the photographer or designer can work on a calibrated and profiled computer monitor to get colors to look accurate on screen, print those colors out on a similarly profiled inkjet printer, then ultimately on a printing press.

For fashion photographers, if they know the product has a particular Pantone Color and captures, whether on film or digital, and brings it into Photoshop, they can recolorize the photograph with the exact Pantone Color. The same is true for architectural and commercial photographers.

In the late ‘80s, Pantone began working with a company called Radius on monitor calibration. As a result, they became one of the first companies to support accurate, calibrated monitors. Monitor calibration is an absolutely critical part of the digital imaging workflow.

In the ‘90s, Pantone turned its attention to better printing. Recognizing that most of the presses sold today are at least six colors, they decided to create a standard process printing system based on six colors as opposed to four. In 1995, Pantone introduced a six-color system called Hexachrome, which is fully supported by many software packages such as QuarkXpress, Adobe Freehand and Corel Draw. Adobe products are supported by a plug-in by Pantone called HexWare.

Richard Herbert, son of Pantone founder Lawrence Herbert, digitized the Pantone system, making it compatible for CMYK printing applications and RGB display applications.

In color-critical applications, such as reproducing original artwork for museums, a photographer could use HexWare for more dynamic range in their separated color. If the photographer has images that are CMYKchallenged that need an extra little bump here and there, they would want to implement Hexachrome.

Using HexWare, the photographer can preview how the image will be handled in Hexachrome in order to obtain a better color match, not only on their computer display and the press, but also what is captured on film.

Today, Pantone has extended its knowledge of print technology and color to the ink world and created ColorVANTAGE inks. Pantone ColorVANTAGE inks are an optimized set of pigmented inks along with expertly created profiles. When used together, they are capable of producing among the best and most accurate color reproduction from your printer. Photographs, artwork and Pantone Colors will print with superior results when compared to OEM inks.

In January of this year, Pantone partnered with GretagMacbeth, a world leader in color-management solutions for photography and digital imaging. The new alliance, known as Pantone/Gretag- Macbeth, will market color-management tools for all levels of users. Their first product, introduced in January, is the huey.

The huey is an affordable ($89) monitor- calibration device about the size of a small marking pen, ideal for carrying in the field to calibrate any laptop. It can also be used to accurately calibrate desktop CRTs without any prior knowledge of color management.

In the spirit of product personification, huey is an endearing little monitor-calibration device from Pantone that requires no color-management experience.

It is the first monitor-calibration device that continually adjusts the monitor as the ambient light changes. In addition to huey, Pantone also sells two devices geared toward creative professionals seeking extensive user control. For this you need to use one of two other color-calibration devices from Pantone/GregtagMacbeth, such as the Eye-One Display LT, an entry-level professional calibration tool, or the Eye-One Display 2, a full-featured calibration tool for the demanding professional. The Display 2 can be used to create your own highquality ICC profiles for accurate onscreen soft-proofing.

When ColorVANTAGE inks are used in conjunction with any of the new Pantone/GretagMacbeth monitor-calibration tools, photographers can achieve an end-to-end color workflow and achieve beautifully printed photos.

And that’s what Pantone is all about. For over 40 years, Pantone has offered an end-to-end process that allows everyone to speak the same concise and precise color language.