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Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

arstechnica.com

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

#61

Post by bayindirh »

noirscape wrote: post #52

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…

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.

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

#62

Post by muro »

newaccount74 wrote: post #27
muro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pantone subscription is 1.5x as expensive as Photoshop.

I'm pretty sure Pantone would have charged only a fraction of the cost if Adobe would have included a license for everyone. Since only a fraction of Photoshop users need Pantone, they now need to pay a lot more.

I assume that's what was the case until now. Probably got too expensive to continue.

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

#63

Post by amelius »

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…

I think their businessmodel simply expired. They have to think of something new or end up like Kodak.

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

#64

Post by pxx »

masklinn wrote: post #45
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.

> ...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. 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…

It seems like people are misunderstanding the approach here.

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."

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

#65

Post by moolcool »

WillAdams wrote: post #41

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 p…

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.

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

#66

Post by pxx »

chrisseaton wrote: post #25
dchia wrote: post #15

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?

By 'hex code' do you mean RGB or CMYK? Pantone encodes more colours than those two.

Your last sentence is just wrong. Pantone encodes thousands of colors. RGB/CMYK can encode references to as many (within-gamut, but you can also hack around this) colors as you want, typically millions, often billions.

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.

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

#67

Post by axiolite »

AdamN wrote: post #51
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.

> Pantone can make money at every level

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.

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

#68

Post by noirscape »

bayindirh wrote: post #61
noirscape wrote: post #52

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…

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.

Oh absolutely, the wording Adobe used is abysmal in telling you exactly why they did it, but arguably that is the point.

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...

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

#69

Post by chrisseaton »

pxx wrote: post #66
chrisseaton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By 'hex code' do you mean RGB or CMYK? Pantone encodes more colours than those two.

Your last sentence is just wrong. Pantone encodes thousands of colors. RGB/CMYK can encode references to as many (within-gamut, but you can also hack around this) colors as you want, typically millions, often billions. 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.

> Your last sentence is just wrong.

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.

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

#70

Post by moolcool »

noirscape wrote: post #60
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…

I'm sorry, but this is a very obtuse way to look at this problem. "Oh, the data is still there. You just don't have any way to read it". Like that's fantastic if you're a massive pedant, but if you actually want to use your files using with tools you used to create them, it's functionally identical to the file being corrupted. Doubly so if the application is some cloud bullshit that you can't keep old/functional versions of, despite paying out the nose for it. And the justification is just that the user wasn't supposed to use that feature in the first place? You have to be so gaslit by Adobe and dark patterns writ large to think this okay.
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