Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 137 posts

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#51

Post by AdamN »

captainmuon wrote: post #7

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 allowi…

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.

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#52

Post by noirscape »

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.

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#53

Post by Hamuko »

masklinn wrote: post #40
Hamuko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a double dip. It's more like a triple dip, as they charge the designers for the physical samples, then they charge the designers in order to reference those physical samples in their Photoshop designs, and then they charge the printers in order to produce the output that the Photoshop files are referencing.

So… they charge people for using their cross-referencing system is what you mean? It’s no more triple dipping than two people each needing their copy of photoshop to work on the same psd.

They want to make sure you pay at every single point where you might think "PANTONE®". So in addition of having to buy the PANTONE® sample book in order to actually know what the PANTONE® colours are, you now need to pay to reference the PANTONE® colours in a Photoshop document so that the receiving party knows which PANTONE® colours they need to get out of a printer.

If they could make you pay for sending an email containing "I need the background to be in PANTONE® Red 032 C", they would.

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#54

Post by HelloNurse »

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?

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#55

Post by qwerty456127 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #34
qwerty456127 wrote: post #26

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.

They should just introduce a more reasonable pricing policy offering personal licenses notably cheaper than corporate licenses, non-commercial and educational licenses even cheaper, major version upgrades at a fraction of a new purchase price. This would be a reasonable, practical, humane model, wouldn't it?

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#56

Post by postpawl »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #10
captainmuon wrote: post #7

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 allowi…

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.

Linus tech tips did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/JF8UziDHqZo

The one they got was more like $10k.

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#57

Post by seba_dos1 »

Hamuko wrote: post #38
seba_dos1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer (by specifying a Pantone color). What this $15 subscription is for is technically just that set of mappings built-in into Photoshop.

And then you'd probably not get what you expect since your CMYK printer isn't calibrated like the print shop's printer is, despite having the same kind of paint.

You get what you want, because you use a Pantone color to match it. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

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)

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#58

Post by yreg »

rsynnott wrote: post #42

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)

Both of those subscriptions seem like business expenses to me. As such they are not that non-sensical.

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.

Re: Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

#60

Post by noirscape »

HelloNurse wrote: post #54

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.

Post reply on HN