I wonder why they don't just charge more for the dyes (or the dye licenses, I think they are not making them themselves). I think it is bizarre that you should need a license to write down in a file "use this-and-that tube of color for printing this shape". If anything, they should be paying Adobe for including their colors.
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...)
They charge designers $X000 for a book or a set of paint chips with swatches of all the colors, so I assume they are trying to continue that revenue stream in a subscription-based way.
I used to work as a GD professionally, Pantones/spot colours are incredibly important in the industry. Process printing (usually CMYK) is great, but often just not accurate enough, and I really doubt Coca Cola or whoever else would be too pleased with you swapping out their pantone colour for an alternative.
> you'd loose the benefit of Pantone standardization
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.
Businesses want multiple revenue streams at different layers of the stack with different cycles. Charging developers, printers, consumable producers, hardware makers, etc... means Pantone can make money at every level and they can increase/decrease the price as those different layers as more or less spending capacity is available at that period in the cycle for that layer.
Charging more for the dyes would impact the bottom line of very large business interests, namely, the chemical companies that make the inks, and the printing and publishing companies.
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.
Most folks who used PANTONE spot colours had no business doing so --- their gaudy layout w/ a dozen spot colours would never be printed w/ that many plates, and some production person always had to get permission to convert them into the process equivalents.
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/.
This is a real Steve Jobs "You're holding it wrong" way to look at this problem. This is an extremely anti-consumer move, and you can't blame the users for it.
Deliberately corrupting (or pretending to corrupt) the user's files is a whole new level of Adobeness.
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?
There's no file corruption, Adobe simply updated it's UI to not provide a rendering color to Pantones colors anymore so they default to black.
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.
I think Pantone is overplaying their hand here. Clearly, their business has been dwindling for years. I started my professional career in graphic design 20 years ago. Design work targeting digital was barely a blip on the radar. It was all print. Interviews for jobs required a physical portfolio. These days, print is the odd man out.
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.
Can someone tell me what value does Pantone bring to the table? As a man-on-the-street I fail to understand what they are claiming for. Is this about the naming Pantone has given to a particular Hex Code?
My understanding is that the entire suite of colors is calibrated by material, among other things. #aabbcc on the screen does not look like #aabbcc when painted onto wood, or from plastic injection moulding. But Pantone Color #32 will be absolutely identical everywhere.
PANTONE colors are specific mixes of pigments, not RGB or CMYK values. A PANTONE color includes elements like texture and lustre in its definition that cannot be captured in primary-color systems like RGB or CMYK. Certain trademark shades, like Tiffany blue, are captured as PANTONE colors as well. PANTONE is the standard for print graphic design because a designer will always know exactly how a PANTONE color will look on paper whereas significant calibration is necessary to get a consistent appearance from RGB or CMYK colors.
From what I recall, its about phyiscal to virtual color matching, so pantone offers samples of say plastic with the exact matching color as the virtual ones, so you can pick a color, tell the manufacturer you want the plastic molded that color and be pretty sure you'll get the right color of product (or if not you can go back to them and tell them to do it according to spec).
You'd also want to calibrate your monitor accordingly of course
It's very valuable if you're printing a single spot color on something. Instead of doing a cyan pass, a magenta pass, a yellow pass, and a black pass, you can just do a black pass and a pass of your spot color. Despite Pantone being a more expensive ink, you may end up spending less money because it allows you to simply use less ink, and fewer resources.
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).
It guarantees that the color will look on a product just like you selected it. In Germany we have an older system called RAL, which is sufficient for most use cases. For example if you ordered a window in RAL 7043 and need to repaint it, you can go to your next hardware store, oder some paint with that color code from any manufacturer, and colors will/should match. But the RAL system applies more or less only to the physical world.
Pantone brings consistency. If you specify a Pantone color, pay a printer to use the right Pantone inks on the right media (and pay for the level of experience for the printer to do this right), you can get exactly what you expect.
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.
The title should really be Pantone wants $15/month for the privilege of using its colors in Creative Cloud or Photoshop Subscription.
>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.
And whatever part of the Creative Cloud customers' money was previously being passed on to Pantone is now being pocketed by Adobe, and they're probably also grabbing a piece of that $15. Pantone is totally willing to be the PR bad guy here, nobody is moving from Pantone. It's an absurdly deeply entrenched and useful standard.
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.
Photoshop already is a rather expensive subscription so whoever doesn't mind paying Adobe obviously uses it for making good money on regular basis and shouldn't have a problem paying Pantone as well.
"Has no choice but to pay for it" != "doesn't mind paying for it."
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.
Photoshop is subscription too now right? So they’re just wanting a cut. It’s almost a funny way to indirectly protest the move to subscription everything.
Yeah, what a great protest. Everyone who is selling lifetime access for a fixed price should do a similar protest and move to subscriptions as well, that would really show them!
Are we now at peak subscription nonsense? $20/month for Twitter, $15/month for Pantone, we may be hitting the point where people say enough is enough :)
(Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)
Serves people right for trusting their own work to subscription software with no guaranteed long term support. Adobe could also just go under one day and then say goodbye to a decade of your photo edits. Charging for color adjustment in print is perfectly reasonable, just to decode RGB values is some bull.
Seriously I think the value they bring demands a price. Seeing how Adobe abuses its market dominance to force people into their cloud, I can understand their attempts to do the same.
The title here is slightly misleading; Adobe refused to renew it's licensing deal with Pantone because the main way Adobes products are being used these days is digital art & design. There's no incentive for Adobe to keep paying licensing fees to Pantone (not to mention that the Adobe version of the plugin hasn't been updated since 2011 and is alledgedly very inaccurate and incomplete), so they're cutting the feature.
Pantone, whose business is selling color matching inks between all sorts of materials (digital, paper, wood, fabrics you get the idea, this is a more expensive craft than one may think it is) is now selling the previous product they licensed out to Adobe as a separate 15$/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.
I think the main problem is how Adobe worded the change. They could have written
"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.
It’s normally a good idea to understand something you are criticising. Pantone do not ‘claim’ colours. They provide exact colour mixes for a variety of differing substrates and materials that guarantees exact replication. For that vast majority of brands, publishers and manufacturers, this is very important and worth paying for.
There are any number of ways to turn Pantone names into hex values. The names are what's important, because they are placeholders for specific formulations of ink.
> 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.
progbits|3 years ago
Alternative free palette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047
captainmuon|3 years ago
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...)
pclmulqdq|3 years ago
bearmode|3 years ago
hdjjhhvvhga|3 years ago
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.
AdamN|3 years ago
KennyBlanken|3 years ago
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.
amelius|3 years ago
WillAdams|3 years ago
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/.
moolcool|3 years ago
HelloNurse|3 years ago
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?
noirscape|3 years ago
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.
H1Supreme|3 years ago
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.
dchia|3 years ago
TkTech|3 years ago
bitwize|3 years ago
iMerNibor|3 years ago
You'd also want to calibrate your monitor accordingly of course
gruez|3 years ago
thesuitonym|3 years ago
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).
jansan|3 years ago
brudgers|3 years ago
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.
chrisseaton|3 years ago
Pantone encodes more colours than those two.
ksec|3 years ago
>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.
pessimizer|3 years ago
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.
raxxorraxor|3 years ago
redtails|3 years ago
poulpy123|3 years ago
qwerty456127|3 years ago
KennyBlanken|3 years ago
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.
api|3 years ago
muro|3 years ago
capableweb|3 years ago
thejosh|3 years ago
iLoveOncall|3 years ago
A cut that is actually larger than the price of Photoshop, which is $10 / month.
praptak|3 years ago
rsynnott|3 years ago
(Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)
yreg|3 years ago
I suppose only a very few people would need a verified Twitter or Pantone in CS without a connection to how they make their livelihood.
cat_plus_plus|3 years ago
counttheforks|3 years ago
nelox|3 years ago
raxxorraxor|3 years ago
Seriously I think the value they bring demands a price. Seeing how Adobe abuses its market dominance to force people into their cloud, I can understand their attempts to do the same.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
noirscape|3 years ago
Pantone, whose business is selling color matching inks between all sorts of materials (digital, paper, wood, fabrics you get the idea, this is a more expensive craft than one may think it is) is now selling the previous product they licensed out to Adobe as a separate 15$/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.
bayindirh|3 years ago
"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.
uri4|3 years ago
moolcool|3 years ago
devd00d|3 years ago
[deleted]
sbuk|3 years ago
matt3210|3 years ago
pessimizer|3 years ago
beastman82|3 years ago
gwbas1c|3 years ago
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.
LelouBil|3 years ago
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.