Freetone – Pantone-ish colour palette for Adobe products | Hacker News Reader

Freetone – Pantone-ish colour palette for Adobe products

culturehustle.com

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I'm not sure how helpful this is? The service Pantone provides is not really a list of colors. It's the calibration of almost every printer and item that can create color, in every medium and on every surface, against their color library. Not just printable colors either, also things that can't be printed like metal and florescent colors.

It means you can get a book cover and a business card printed, some plastic injection molded, have your car painted and be assured they are all going to be exactly the same color when they arrive. It's the mapping between pantone names and the real world that's valuable, and this doesn't seem to help with that.

But if there is a 1:1 mapping from Freetone to Pantone, shouldn't this still work? Crappy thing is that Pantone wants designers to pay for the ability to associate some area with a specific Pantone hue.

Paying Pantone for the work they put into developing a calibrated colour system across printers, inks and sub-straits isn’t “crappy”.

Adobe pulling a product feature from paid customers existing install/subscription because they failed to licence the feature properly from the supplier is crappy.

Pantone is, in my option, being somewhat unduly attacked for this change. This is 100% on Adobes head.

Pantone have been a popular punching bag for the design industry for 30 years. And it may be true they over charge for what they offer. But this is Adobes f*up.

Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement.

What I would love to see is a new “free”/libra/open colour system, superseding what Pantone offer. Let’s not just copy people because we feel slighted.

They can and do charge for products related to actually making the colors. That doesn't mean they should get paid for which RGB code looks close.

And the idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous.

> idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous

Absolutely, however at least here in the UK (and I suspect the EU), copying the Pantone colour book would be classed as copying a “database”. Databases are copyrightable, whether you agree with that or not.

My argument is rather than doing something that drags the copyright debate into to situation just make something better and “free as in beer and speech”.

Copying something that is “copyright” to “free it” puts you on the back foot. You will loos the argument eventually.

I agree. Having such an essential collection gated behind a copyright is a net detriment to humanity. Imagine if collection known as a SI system of units was owned by a corporation and you had to pay a license to use it.

Be careful with your wording. In some places databases are IP, but database rights are not copyright.

And you could still install individual colors in that case, right? The average project shouldn't have many.

Pantone isn't copyrighting the colors, they're copyrighting the collection. It's similar to copyrighting a map: you're not claiming that all representations of this part of the world now belong to you, you're claiming that this representation belongs to you.

It does seem like Adobe could have mapped the colors in existing files to a useful hex code instead of blacking them all out.

The issue is that map from "named colors" to "useful colors" is sufficiently protected that approximations could run afoul of whatever agreement Adobe and Pantone have in place.

Most likely, yes. There's a non-trivial amount of work that goes into ensuring that colors show up correctly in every medium, and Pantone will absolutely want to prevent other people from copying the mappings that they spent time and money developing. As OP said, though, that doesn't make them the bad guys. Adobe is the one who failed to take care of their customers.

I think your comment is outrage caused by a lack of understanding of the product.

They don’t copyright the color. The copyright the product associated with the color.

You can use the same RGB or CMYK colors. You however don’t get the guarantees of what the spectral responses of that color are and you don’t get the guarantees of printers having palettes to match the color.

Copyrighting a product? What are you talking about? You can get trademarks on some things, but copyrights are not relevant here.

I can tell a printer to color match a pantone swatch without violating anything.

But aren't they already getting licensing fees from printer and color mixer manufacturers? Requiring someone to pay just to be able to specify "I want this thing painted with Pantone XYZ" sounds like double-dipping to me.

They don’t require a license fee in order to specify an area as a specific colour. You could literally write it on as an instruction to your printer. I have literally done that.

They charge Adobe for the right to include their database of colours in their software. Adobe failed to negotiate a sustainable relationship, and sold a product to customers under the pretence of including the Pantone database, then pulled it.

While it is Adobe’s fault for implementing really poorly, there has to be some blame on creators making works using the Pantone palette without really understanding what it’s for and the fact that it is licensed, presenting risk that it won’t necessarily be available in the future.

A lot of people used the colors as just a nice useful palette. In hindsight that was never a good idea.

Are you sure about that? Most people I know who used Pantone colors were using them because their print product used one of those as a (special) spot color. You cannot print metallic copper on just any CMYK printer no matter how much you fiddle with the numbers. When you want a color to look as close as possible to a certain thing using a spot color (Pantone or otherwise) is the way to go.

You just answered it yourself. Most people you know, what about the other people? What do they use it for? Not it’s intended use, whatever it is, which is part of my point (the other part is understanding the risk of vendor lock-in).

The other people don't use it at all. They use the color selector or the default swatches.

I know no person who uses pantone seatches and does not know about spot colors. And my environment are self thought people not professional graphic designers.

I think you are overlooking the fact that Adobe is offering a subscription service. And one of the downsides of doing that is that organizations that license stuff to you (like Pantone) have a bigger leverage over you, because eevoking the license will remove their IP from all of the users, not just the ones with new versions of the software.

Whithout having put any research into this at all, it would not surprise me if Pantone tried to use that lever.

I’m sure that did, as any of us would in their position.

Adobe should have anticipated this and ensures they had perpetual licensing in place. It’s ridiculous that the largest graphics technology company in the world have managed this so badly.

Frankly I don't know why Adobe haven’t either acquired Pantone at some point in the past or developed their own alternative standard. It’s such a blind sport for them.

The company that owns Pantone is worth about $90 billion. It's more likely to go the other way.

Danaher, their patent, is many times larger (and significantly more diverse) than Pantone which was acquired for $180m in 2007. Adobe should have acquired them then. Assuming no growth they would be worth around $250m now. Well within the reach of Adobe.

I'm referring to Danaher. My point is it's too late. They're not going to sell something that commands $10k for spindles of plastic chips. It prints money.

Why is it too late?

Why would Danaher sell it? It's more likely Danaher would buy Adobe for the same reason it bought Pantone. Synergy!

The problem isn't really related to subscriptions. Adobe Soundbooth, the precursor to Audition, was a paid for product with a perpetual license, but still they pulled major features for failing to license some crucial libraries. Notably, this happened to installed programs. A few years later, the program wouldn't start at all (still the same installation).

> Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement.

I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint (with the context that APIs are largely protected under fair use).

Pantone should be compensated for what they do. They should have the option to recoup their costs but not necessarily by restricting others from using their published digital interface for colour-to-paint reproduction.

They should be able to maintain IP rights for the tooling they build to faithfully reproduce those colours as paint and their trademark should obviously be protected but the actual colour codes themselves? How is that any different than say Google using the same API for Oracle's Java for their alternative JDK & JVM?

At the end of the day in both cases, the useful part isn't the API/colour codes but the tech used to actually run Java/reproduce those colours faithfully as paint.

> I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint

I would roughly say that Pantone is a specific arrangement of a set of specific items, with the arrangement intentionally conveying a unique meaning to the set. Just like a book or a picture or song or a piece of code.

(IANAL, I don't intend that definition to stand up in courts, just describing how and why it makes sense to me that it could or should be treated the same way)

They want designers to pay for associating some area with a specific pantone code, not with "a hue" or "an rgb or cmyk color". The Adobe pallete is just a stand-in for the actual codes, so it's not about "they took away our colors", it's "they took away the mapping between what I'm working with and the pantone colors that get used when I actually send this off to a manufacturer" because what you pay for is Pantone's guarantee that if your product says it uses Pantone code X, it's going to look the same irrespective of who makes the physical thing, and irrespective of when you get it made. You use pantone when you need that guarantee, and you pay them for that. It's why their color libraries are so expensive: you don't get "neat colors", you get "if we say our product uses code X, on material Y, it's going to come out exactly like this". Not very similar, but exactly.

Freetone can't do that. It's just a palette, and kind of completely misses the point. Using some nice colors is trivial, anyone can make a color palette. Pantone is not that.

> Freetone can't do that. It's just a palette, and kind of completely misses the point.

For sure. Stuart Semple appears to be an expert when it comes to ink and printing, which makes this feel all the more disingenuous.

It's not missing the point. You'd still use pantone for actual printing. This exists so the colors don't show up as black while you're editing.

*some colors

There's zero point in designing with Pantone if you're not going to use actual Pantone. Just use any palette (including this one) then.

How do you know which Pantone color to specify when printing?

You tell your printer "[Pantone] Green 0921 C" or whatever the color is. This is a compatible list with the same ID numbers.

You pick a spot color the same way you would have done it a month ago. And you print the same way you would have done it a month ago, except possibly with an extra annotation on the spot color.

The main use of this plugin is to let you actually see your spot colors instead of black while you edit. The secondary use is to give you a rough idea of the available colors, but you wouldn't finalize picking a spot color based on how it looks on a screen anyway, you'd get an actual sample.

So Freetone maintains the mapping between its own Freetone colors and the Pantone colors?

You mean all four of the ones up top?

Those were added to be cheeky. You can ignore them.

All the ones that say SEMPLETONE+ are 1:1 and don't need to be maintained.

Okay, so I’m a printer. You specify a free tone which allows me to get the SEMPLETONE+ which allows me to get the PANTONE with a simple database lookup, and I just need to pay PANTONE for calibration essentially.

Is that correct? Where am I off?

More or less, yes.

Or better, I export the file saying PANTONE.

For the printer, nothing changes.

This plugin exists so that designers don't have to pay $21 per month per seat for effectively nothing. It's not an attempt to shun Pantone entirely.

The creator does have experience producing physical paints and pigments, so they are aware of the points you're making.

The purpose here is not to replace Pantone entirely, but to be able to represent Pantone colors somewhat faithfully in digital documents. Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore. This is meant as an alternative.

> Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore

This is wrong, you can still use the rgb approximations.

Sure, you can still use the colors, but they're removing the picker for them.

They are also making it so anything that previously had the colour selected using the picker is set to black unless you pay them a licensing fee.

There is obviously value in Pantone and what they do but the digital representation of Pantone's colours should be treated the same way APIs are.

But existing uses of Pantone colors will be appearing as black, not their RGB approximations, unless you pay $21/mo. from November on in Adobe products.

What a ludicrous business decision

Having been on the receiving end of things like this, it’s likely outside Adobes hands. I had a product where they changed licensing to a revenue sharing model, asking for 10% vs a flat fee. Problem was, only like 3-4 customers out of hundreds were using the licensed feature. Long story short, it made it unsustainable and we quickly dropped the technology.

If using Pantone compatible colors in Adobe is necessary for your business you can license the color palette for use in Adobe products and pay the $15 a month for it.

Cost of doing business.

The problem is that it wasn't a cost of doing business last month. So if someone used what was an ordinary feature in their files, they can no longer open them in any usable manner-- apparently it maps everything to black.

Okay, Adobe and Pantone have decided to do a bold business decision that breaks existing files. That's their perogative. But in terms of minimizing bridge burning, their goal should be to fail tactfully and with as little lossage as possible. For a comparable, if you loaded a 12-bit-per-channel high-dynamic-range file in a software stack that only supported 8 bits per channel, the right answer is to discard the least significant bits, not just throw up your hands.

A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."

> A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."

I don't quite think Adobe would be allowed to do that though. If what Adobe was previously licensing on your behalf was the translations from Pantone codes to RGB/CMYK and the files saved with Pantone colors only have Pantone codes, then the best you could do is list the missing colors and ask the user to manually substitute in color choices from available color spaces for each missing color.

Pantone formulates, tests and manufacturers bespoke pigments and dyes, then makes the available for purchase.

The creator does have experience producing physical paints and pigments

Unless the creator can overnight formulated inks to my print shop, it is not a practical alternative to Pantone, because Pantone’s business is selling consistency in markets where consistency matters.

I am not saying it is not a nice piece of work, but it is only applicable where consistency doesn’t matter very much…and though that is most of the time for most people regarding most things, what you get correlates with what you pay for.

I think the idea is the palette contains the same colors.

So if I have a file that was using some spot colors such as PANTONE 576 C, I can sub those colors for TEMPLETONE+ 576 C, which look the same on screen.

When I send that to your print shop you could presumably do the reverse process, then print with the same inks you did last week. Everyone is happy, except for PANTONE.

Print shops can’t just magically replicate any on-screen color on print, even if the print color is defined by some paint formula. There are too many variations involved. There has to be process for calibrating the equipment and accounting for variation in the materials to get a proper match. You still need a company like Pantone to provide that, even if you want to use a slightly different print color that looks the same as another Pantone color on-screen.

My point is that nobody is debating this! This is entirely about having an "unencumbered" set of RGB approximations to those same colors. When you send your design to the printer or whatever, you still need to specify the actual Pantone colors.

True, which is why Pantone should be happy even if you don't pay the subscription fee, because they're still going to be used plenty.

Making it harder to describe your product in terms of Pantone colors hurts them, which is the dumbest part of this situation.

> True, which is why Pantone should be happy even if you don't pay the subscription fee, because they're still going to be used plenty.

That doesn't sound right. Pantone is a for-profit company who doesn't get paid unless you pay something to them. They do not get any money from you just using anything Pantone.

If Pantone was a non-profit/FOSS project then sure, they would be happy for any type of usage. But they're not, so not sure why they should be happy if people are not paying.

> But they're not, so not sure why they should be happy if people are not paying.

Because of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389848 your use of Pantone colors for free causes your print shop to spend huge sums on Pantone goods and services.

Sure, I didn't suggest otherwise.

FWIW I don't think this "freetone" library is very practical. Pros who need it will pay the $15/mo to pantone, in addition to the $99/mo they pay to Adobe.

I don’t own a print shop.

By “my print shop” I meant one I am in a business relationship with.

Pantone also sells a list of rgb colors for photoshop. This is what this is replacing https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/kb/pantone-plus.html

Can't we just represent colors using the underlying physics? Like how ray tracers represent them?

Description of the spectrum? That would provide different descriptions for what looks the same. Also, it would require a description of the spectrum of the light source lighting the colored surface.

But it would be great. Two differently produced paints would look the same under all lighting conditions.

That's not entirely true. Nonlinear effects exist. E.g. fluorescence can cause emission of one light frequency after being hit with another.

Regardless of that, you could also make a physical model of the human retina, and use that to remove any parts from the model that you think are redundant.

Also, the tools that Pantone uses to map colors have some kind of built-in physical model already, I suppose (not a Pantone expert obviously).

It's a better alternative to the current experience of having existing projects practically held hostage. If you used Pantone colors previously, they now render as black until you either pay Pantone or install this.

What else should have been done? They are just named references to an external library. Now the library is no longer there due to licensing and a perpetual sans-ownership of the software. Seems like null data.

Okay, what if they allow you to see the exact mix of that previous swatch so you can easily migrate away from the Pantone library entirely. That seems like a pretty poor way to handle a business relationship with the likes of Pantone, there would be 0 incentive at that point for someone to explore that (needed?) license on their own.

They should have replaced the named references with the color they refer to. The value is in the reference, not the color. Pantone sells being able to say "Very Peri" in your PSD and having that being the same whether you're printing it, painting it, manufacturing it, whatever.

Replacing it with #AABBCC doesn't hurt them, because there's no matching that can be done any more across materials.

> also things that can't be printed like metal and florescent colors.

Actually those things can be printed with foils. You will find foils commonly printed onto a lot of consumer packaging on top of a laser printed base.

Pedantic details aside, the manufacturers of the foils and vinyls to which you refer have their own unique colour/material collections that intersect pantone to some degree, and so they provide a separate "closest pantone" mapping. Given enough pressure I suspect they would adapt faster than pantone are gambling provided an obvious enough alternative.

Which only adds to the confusion. Why are they charging a license on a product which feeds into people buying hard copies of colour charts, clip books and samples? That's where the money is.

Babying the IP in software is cutting off broad usage. This will hurt sales.

As someone that works a lot with both Pantone and RAL, I've never understood the value proposition of the these digital color palettes - the fact of the matter is, they're just not good matches to the physical colors to begin with.

Obviously, a physical product is reflected light, a monitor is emissive light, etc. This means they're never going to be exact no matter how much work you put into it, but... I have a calibrated monitor with measured coverage of over 99% sRGB, a delta E max below 1, a delta E average of .4, calibrated to D65, with a 98 CRI D65 color matching light, and... the colors are way off. At best the hex values they give are decent starting points, but if you are attempting to provide an accurate representation in digital form of what the color is, these were never good enough to begin with.

You need the physical samples (books, plastic chips, whatever), a calibrated monitor, and a good color matching light to really dial the colors in to be close. These libraries were never worth it to begin with.

When you go to get something printed/resins and inks mixed for plastic/whatever, they're not matching to these digital values - they match to physical samples. My printer won't produce the same physical product using the same CMYK values as your printer, etc. They get out their pantone book and compare the printed color to what is in the book, and then adjust from there. For anything requiring high color accuracy, anyway.

That's what I always thought, too, that the point of referencing Pantone colors is simply that I know what I'll get from the print shop will match the physical swatch I looked at.

Have you considered Observer Metamerism, your display might have very narrowband primaries for example. Your vision could also be an outlier of the CIE Standard Observers, thus any calibration attempt will not be super effective.

>your display might have very narrowband primaries for example

I am using a professional display that is intended for color-accurate work, and similarly have other very accurate, calibrated, monitors that show the same results.

> Your vision could also be an outlier of the CIE Standard Observers, thus any calibration attempt will not be super effective.

I've scored near perfectly to perfectly on a variety of Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue (and inspired) tests using the same displays, and I speak frequently with others who also have to do color accurate work while dealing the Pantone and RAL colors. They universally report the same thing.

Fundamentally if these digital values were good enough, we wouldn't need the physical samples to begin with.

Good to see something new from Stuart Semple — the guy who made the “blackest black” (Black 2.0), which everyone except Anish Kapoor can purchase…

https://www.thecollector.com/vantablack-anish-kapoor-stuart-...

> Good to see something new from Stuart Semple ... Black 2.0

I mean, he's released Black 3.0 and about 20 other things since then. The man is a non-stop craft supplies firehose.

Hadn't noticed that Freetone was Semple's brainchild. It checks out and I love him for it.

I dabble a bit, and Black 2.0 (havent' tried 3.0) is like magic.

I also heartily recommend Semple's glow-in-the-dark pigment, but be sure to mix well, it's a non-soluble powder and can yield unintended 3D effects if the mix is off (or you did not mortar/pestle)

That is absolutely hilarious. I wonder how much Anish Kapoor paid for those exclusive rights.

The story in podcast format: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/their-dark-materials/

I was quite impressed with the FreieFarbe[1] presentation at Libre Graphics Meetup 2019. It is an open source service that actually does attempt to provide similar value as Pantone, not just the naming of sRGB colors. In particular, they've put nontrivial work into calibrating it to physical colorants.

[1]: https://www.freiefarbe.de/en/