Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Alternative free palette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047
Maybe this is a possible evolution? Third party ink producers create photoshop add-ins allowing you to specify their specific products - not just standardized colors but actual bottles? I mean you'd loose the benefit of Pantone standardization. But anyway I use the colors brands that my trusted printshop uses. If they tell me ACME ink 1234 is the same as Pantone ABCD then I just would replace that in the document and be done.
(Well to be honest for 99% of things I did spot colors (I think that's the term) are overkill anyway and my printshop guy just told me to use CYMK...)
The one they got was more like $10k.
It's still quite a bit, but even the FHI chip books are under $1k. You have to be doing something a bit nuts like getting the full plastic chip carousels to get up into the thousands.
That's the point: these colors should be a standard. Standards can also be acquired for a fee. I also purchased physcial samples of Pantone colors. But paying an annual fee for the privilege of specifying a color in an app? No, thank you.
Yes, but there's something to be said of the "First one's free, kid" business model. Making it frictionless to get into your ecosystem usually results in many more sales in the end.
Fewer graphics designers using pantone colors means fewer products going out with pantone colors, which means fewer sales of pantone dyes.
You can care less about your colors, but for some categories of graphic designers, that's not an option.
For many more, it IS an option. If it's trivial for them to select pantone colors for their designs, they probably will use them. If they don't have easy access to pantone colors, they'll just select an approximate shade they like.
In the former (frictionless) case, more pantone dyes may get used. In the later (current reality) case, they certainly will not. It's not a stretch to think that pantone may be cutting themselves off from a potential growth market, in exchange for a rather small amount of cash up-front.
Many designers won't care that their banners look slightly different from their tee-shirts and both are slightly different from their business cards. For others, though, they think the variation looks tacky and cheap.
Those are the ones who will pay. It's a very small fraction of their commission on a work.
What's a bad look for Pantone is how many people had been using their colors without really needing to, and still getting cut off. They would usually be fine with a "close enough" shade. I can't tell if that's Adobe's fault, Pantone's, or (probably) both.
Forcing a contract graphic designer to pay $15/month for the privilege of being able to participate in designing stuff for print is much more palatable to business interests.
For those few jobs where it is actually getting printed as a spot colour? The job would still print fine --- just send along a PANTONE colour chip, or ask your printer to provide one to verify colour usage.
If you still want to use spot colours, use a free library such as the one developed by GCMI, then your printer can pull out the spot colour book and figure out which you actually want to print w/.
I've always held that the spot colours should be an optional install, and only installable _after_ a user has passed a quiz on what spot colours and printing plates are.
Why would one select an option to use a spot colour intended for having a printing press print on coated stock if one wasn't going to have the job printed on such stuck thus?
How can the distinction between the colour representations be maintained w/o having a specific option for spot colour?
People who make the wrong choice should suffer the consequences of that wrong decision.
For my part, I want back all of my life and energy which has been used explaining what spot colours are, why it would cost a fortune to print a job w/ 23 spot colour plates, and why the job was converted to process and a charge made for said conversion.
"You should have picked PANTONE 628 the CMYK process build, or the RGB Hex version if it wasn't a spot colour job"
To be frank, I don't know what the hell any of that means. But why should I have to? Why should I "suffer" because I don't know a bunch of gatekeepy factoids about the real-life differences between PANTONE 628 and B7DDE1? "Oh, sorry honey. You know that wedding invitation design I made last week and showed you? Well that's gone now, because I entered the colour we liked in the wrong format. It's my fault though. I used a colour palette intended for spot colour printing. What a goof! I am rightfully being punished".
Don't you see how this is insane? I can see a colour I like in real life, and see that there is a tag associated with that colour. I can tell that tag to a piece of software that I pay for, and have the software return a result I like. Then that software can, out of nowhere and without warning, decide to tell me "Oh, I'm not going to show you this colour any more". And then I'm expected to say "Oh, that's reasonable. I should have understood that the colour entry field I used was subject to cancellation, and only intended for spot colour for printing on coated stock".
If you want to print it on your CMYK inkjet printer, just choose the CMYK build, and if you want to put the image on your web site, choose the RGB hex representation.
Because Adobe doesn't have an option for substrate representation, there are two spot colour libraries (for coated/uncoated stock), and in order for a job to print properly on a commercial press, spot colours have to be identifiable so that a plate can be made.
To use a car analogy, it's like a person complaining that their truck needs diesel because they didn't understand what the diesel engine description on the window sticker meant.
Are they trying to shame Pantone, as some optimistic comments suggest, or happy to get a valued partner's help in their mission to evolve subscriptions to be more like ransomware?
If you were to have another program that can open PSDs and provide rendering colors for Pantones colors, it'd work just fine. They're cutting a feature (one Adobe had been neglecting for over a decade), not corrupting any files.
For the people who weren't supposed to be using Pantone to begin with (digital only artists), yeah it's annoying. For those people a simple conversion of Pantone to RGB in their files should be enough though and older versions of Photoshop can do that if I understand it correctly (hence why Adobe is recommending older versions of Photoshop for people affected by this). Everyone else seems to not have been supposed to use the Adobe functionality anyway because it's extremely outdated.
You can still download older versions of Adobes apps, it's right there in the ARS article even (Creative Cloud lets you download older versions of PS, InDesign and the like), so your second argument about cloud bullshit doesn't go up there either.
As for the "not supposed to use" part; digital artists were never meant to use Pantone Spot colors to begin with. They're very specifically intended for graphic designers who are planning to have their works printed on different designs. That is what their colors are for.
I don't think Adobe handled (or communicated) this well at all, but this is de facto not data corruption.
This is like pushing a firmware update to DVD players that makes certain disks unreadable. "Actually Grandma, your DVDs aren't corrupted. There's just a licensing dispute between Technicolor and the DVD standards consortium, making your existing tools no longer up to the task. The data is all still there on the discs!"
Pantone support is a neglected feature that Adobe thinks most people should not be using.
* Do you pop up a UI saying "hey you're using it wrong, convert it" then run the risk that a user needs Pantone support and accidentally converts their files from Pantone and doesn't have a back up?
* Do you automatically convert their files and run the risk of getting sued when the user discovers the change?
* Do you automatically charge their Adobe account $10 and render the colors using Pantone?
* Do you eat the $10 for each user on the off chance they need Pantone?
* Do you eat the $10 only if a user ever opens a Pantone format file? The following week Pantone releases some asset free to everyone in Pantone format to boost their quarterly revenue?
They chose an option that makes it apparent to the user that there's a problem they need to resolve without embedding any controversy in their App or potentially harming user's file.
Pantone support has been in their products for 30 years and only recently did Pantone start asking for money.
Historically Pantone has not charged a fee for Adobe to map the Pantone colorspace because it was advantageous for Pantone to not do so. The rationale being that the more widely available the Palette, the more likely it is to be used in print products.
Today Pantone has decided that it no longer wishes for that information to be shared freely and has compelled Adobe to stop mapping the colorspace by requiring they pay an outrageous per-user fee to do so.
Adobe recognizes that the overwhelming majority of it's users do not need Pantone, even if they're inadvertently or mistakenly using it. So they are unwilling to pay a per-user fee to enable a feature only a small subset of their users actually need.
How can you say that Adobe deliberately making Photoshop stop working "means your tools aren't up to the task"? This is, frankly, victim-shaming.
So, the almighty Pantone swatch book has less value than it once did. Especially, if they want to hose users for $15 a month to use the swatches. Does that mean everyone gets a swatch book for free? Which, btw, is all that matters. The digital swatches really don't mean shit. It's just a placeholder color separation that means "insert spot color here".
Fwiw, in all my years of print design, I used the Pantone swatch book less than a handful of times. It was 99.9% CMYK (which I also had a swatch book for). Maybe it was just the industry/clients I worked with. But, spot colors could add significant cost to a project. So, it was rarely opted.
You'd also want to calibrate your monitor accordingly of course
I have never found the Pantone hexs to be particularly close to even the basic coated/uncoated guide colors, either, despite having about as good of a color matching setup as one can get at the prosumer level (and do not see how going from the four-digit to five-digit range would close the gap in color accuracy on thee hexes)
As someone with 3 Pantone decks and 2 RAL decks within arm's reach while writing this, I've never understood the value proposition of these virtual libraries beyond a quick and dirty starting point for digital representation. When something goes to print, your printer isn't going to be comparing against what it looks like digitally, either. They'll either use their proprietary spot ink/dye mix/etc., or pull out their guide and compare physical to physical.
Every time I've sent stuff to a printer that has spot color in it, they've wanted it manually referenced as well, so I've never been able to just hand over an EPS or PDF that had spot color in it and get it done without additional work anyway.
But that's true when viewing anything to be printed on-screen.
The only way to get there is to do a lot of printing.
It’s no more triple dipping than two people each needing their copy of photoshop to work on the same psd.
If they could make you pay for sending an email containing "I need the background to be in PANTONE® Red 032 C", they would.
That’s not going to work, because the natures of the different surface will make a given RGB/CMYK perceptually differ.
Think display calibration, except a lot worse.
The point of the Pantone system is that they’ve done the legwork to get perceptual matchings across surfaces, and design paint mix recipes to achieve reproducible matching. That’s what you’re paying for.
Let's say I want to print something in Pantone 123 (careful, Fluke might go after me!) I send over a design artifact that uses the color #ffc72b. Now, when it comes time for printing, the printer can't print RGB, but I also specify the mapping "#ffc72b is actually Pantone 123".
The printer _uses Pantone 123_. We don't suffer any loss of color fidelity. We only use RGB/CMYK as stand-ins for the correct color.
Note there are millions (24-bit) or billions (32-bit, but I mean, you can use however many bits you want) of RGB/CMYKs and only thousands of Pantones. This mapping doesn't need to be lossy.
Yes, yes, yes, #ffc72b is not Pantone 123. But it _is_ if I say "map everything to the closest Pantone color."
Considering the part that quotes the original post is missing the whole "Pantone colour" bit, I feel like the post was edited afterwards.
I have a terrible tendency to hit the send button too soon and then update the post multiple times with typo fixes and clarifications...
You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team.
$15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.
That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.
However, for Photoshop specifically, the only use of that information is to display an RGB approximation.
(although with uncalibrated printer you'd be screwed one way or another, I guess)
Not to mention when you supply a Pantone color, you will get exactly that color, no matter what print shop you go to (As long as they pay for Pantone inks).
By which I mean your company logo will by the right color (assuming your logo was specified as a Pantone color).
When printed, of course.
The hubub is because the Pantone color pallets have been a convenient way of picking colors for many use cases where consistency doesn't matter enough to pay for Pantone inks and the class of printer who can do them right...which is almost all use cases, everywhere all the time.
Pantone created the onscreen colors to facilitate soft proofing. In the small segment of users using them for that, the cost of a license is trivial because clients who require Pantone colors already expect to pay the costs associated with using them.
Pantone encodes more colours than those two.
Sure, you might not get Pantone 123 if somebody asks for #ffc72b. But if somebody says "use Pantone colors only" and specifies #ffc72b, you're going to get Pantone 123.
How do you express metallic gold 817 using RGB.
Which of those components gives you how metallic it is? It's not even 1-1 as it depends on the paper used! Their own books show how lossy it is - they show the corresponding CMYK and it often barely matches.
> within-gamut
Ah so you already knew it wasn't true.
How is this not question-begging?
>To hear Pantone tell it, Adobe had not been updating the Pantone color libraries in its apps for more than a decade, which prompted the end of the previous licensing deal and the wholesale removal of the old libraries from Adobe's apps in favor of the Pantone Connect Extension.
It sounds like Adobe doesn't want to pay X amount of money for it. And we now end up with the drama. But considering the cost of other Pantone tools, I am not surprised at the $15 mark.
The people that don't understand what's so special about Pantone are really irrelevant because they don't understand print and were never really customers. Of the people that do get it, I think 99.9% would prefer an open color standard (or openesque, because what Pantone does is not easy and has to generate income), but understand how insane a political/physical undertaking that would be to avoid paying $15 a month for products that they're already overpaying for.
I'd rather ditch Adobe than ditch Pantone.
Lots of graphic designers, "employed" as contractors, have to pay for photoshop.
One of the reasons Adobe moved to this "cloud" shit is because lot of large companies tended to delay upgrading for quite some time...not because they couldn't afford it, but because most of their bargain-basement labor force couldn't.
Since only a fraction of Photoshop users need Pantone, they now need to pay a lot more.
All the dev team talent left or was outsourced and the only changes that seem to be able to ship consistently is web view based welcome screens.
A cut that is actually larger than the price of Photoshop, which is $10 / month.
I understand the outcry but TBH I think it’s a bit exaggerated. That being said I‘m also not sure whether it’s really worth it for Pantone to charge for their digital stuff. I can’t imagine it being a huge part of their revenue.
Pantone has nothing to do with software.
The "software" here is a mapping of color names to hex. It's literally a text file.
Or, for a digital analogy, think of the good old discussion of the cost of distributing an mp3 vs the cost of creating the music (esp. back in the iTunes days when the mp3 cost $0.99).
In this case, Pantone prices the verified digital access to their colours. Almost nobody needs that, UNLESS you deal with Pantone colours in the physical world - and there they have real value.
I'm personally questioning the decision of making designers pay for the digital colours as well; I think it hurts adoption in the long run. But I also think the outcry is over the top: if you design products that require standardised colours in the manufacturing process, the cost of that tiny subscription is completely negligible. Also, because it's negligible, I can't imagine it being a huge part of Pantone's revenue, so this move might have done them more harm than good, but well...
Either way, it seems to me that there's tons of people complaining about this price, but pretty much no-one ever really worked with Pantone colours. That's why I think the internet is overreacting.
(Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)
I suppose only a very few people would need a verified Twitter or Pantone in CS without a connection to how they make their livelihood.
Seriously I think the value they bring demands a price. Seeing how Adobe abuses its market dominance to force people into their cloud, I can understand their attempts to do the same.
Pantone, whose business is selling color matching inks between all sorts of materials (digital, paper, wood, fabrics you get the idea, this is a more expensive craft than one may think it is) is now selling the previous product they licensed out to Adobe as a separate 15$/month plugin. The fees specifically exist to make sure that the colors on screen do actually match the colors of the ink that Pantone provides to printing companies. That's why it costs money - Pantone is constantly adding, changing and tweaking those inks to make sure they're as uniform as possible and digital is just another target they have to provide a matching color for.
The only real problem I see here is that Adobe didn't account for the fact that a lot of people likely used it as a hue selector in Photoshop and that they didn't provide an easy one-time Pantone Spot Color to RGB conversion and instead just blacked out the colors.
"We didn't renew our license with Pantone because it was eating into our profits, so you are on your own now. We also changed said colors to black, to make it easier to spot what you are missing. Have a nice day".
Instead they've written some corporate speak, and let the thing roll by itself.
Nobody wants to hear "yeah so we're killing the feature you're using because it's not profitable enough for us anymore", speaking from experience of this happening with certain FOSS projects (where profit is substituted with "Gary wrote this 5 years ago and we haven't seen him in 3 years so I'm going to yoink it before it starts causing bugs since I dont want to spend time maintaining Gary's code"). That's not an indictment of FOSS projects to be clear (free gift horse and all that), but it does show insight in how feature cuts will come across when done for those sorts of reasons.
The other problem is that sites like Kotaku[1] decided to run the story in a decisively false manner by suggesting that Pantone is trying to copyright the color spectrum. The ARSTechnica article is a slightly more nuanced take on that Kotaku article which was blatantly bad faith, but still overwhelmingly missing the point.
[1]: https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone-color-plugin-adobe-crea...
Long term, this might be a better model for Pantone - they're building a direct relationship with the print shops and other businesses that actually need this feature. Short term, a lot of users just treated this as an alternate color picker and Adobe is trying to manage who gets the flack.
Of course they are not going to pass on the savings to the user, except perhaps indirectly by having a way of easing the shareholder pressure to increase revenue per user, and thereby being able to push license price increases into the future. (I don't know this is how it would play out, but it is a possibility).
Removing something they are bundling from Pantone today also gives Pantone an incentive to build a direct relationship to the users, which may actually be an opportunity in disguise for Pantone. Or perhaps not: Pantone might find that they are worse off if the market turns out to be smaller in terms of profit potential.
(Disclosure: I don't use Pantone. However I do use color palettes from various manufacturers of paints. Very occasionally. And my requirements aren't really at the level where I need to use a calibrated toolchain. I make pictures, I spray paint, and if it roughly looks like what I saw on screen I'm happy.)
You can't copyright facts. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
> Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.[1] In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.
What is copyrighted is a set of names for colors, that Pantone came up with, which they can have "standardized" for each material they sell ink for.