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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 $10 / month.
I understand the outcry but TBH I think it’s a bit exaggerated. That being said I‘m also not sure whether it’s really worth it for Pantone to charge for their digital stuff. I can’t imagine it being a huge part of their revenue.
(Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)
I suppose only a very few people would need a verified Twitter or Pantone in CS without a connection to how they make their livelihood.
Seriously I think the value they bring demands a price. Seeing how Adobe abuses its market dominance to force people into their cloud, I can understand their attempts to do the same.
Pantone, whose business is selling color matching inks between all sorts of materials (digital, paper, wood, fabrics you get the idea, this is a more expensive craft than one may think it is) is now selling the previous product they licensed out to Adobe as a separate 15$/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.
