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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

#81

Post by thesuitonym »

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?

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).

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

#82

Post by seba_dos1 »

Hamuko wrote: post #79
seba_dos1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added the part in brackets afterwards to prevent further misunderstanding, but it doesn't change the meaning of the post, which was just to move the actual color definition out-of-band. I have a terrible tendency to hit the send button too soon and then update the post multiple times with typo fixes and clarifications...

It changes the meaning massively. The original was just "pick a CMYK colour and then tell them what kind of paint you want it printed with", the latter is "pick a CMYK colour and then tell them what it actually need to look like".

"What kind of paint you want it printed with" assumed that it's already after matching it to whatever Pantone definition you're after given the materials/conditions/printing method etc., otherwise you're quite obviously not going to get the result you want.

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

#83

Post by cthalupa »

iMerNibor wrote: post #20
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?

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…

You'll never get exact matching colors between a digital representation and a physical sample - there are too many variables at play an distinct physical differences that can't be made up.

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.

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

#84

Post by H1Supreme »

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.

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

#85

Post by stuart78 »

muro wrote: post #13
api wrote: post #2

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.

The Pantone subscription is 1.5x as expensive as Photoshop.

I think those needing to subscribe to the new Pantone service are more likely to be paying for the full cc suite, not the single app model. This is quite a bit less than that per month.

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

#87

Post by johannes1234321 »

axiolite wrote: post #67
AdamN wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pantone never was free, just Adobe paid license fees and now isn't renewing their contract (which probably got higher fees)

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

#88

Post by seba_dos1 »

pxx wrote: post #64
masklinn wrote: post #45

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. 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 o…

Even better - you don't have to worry about it being "lossy" or not as you don't just map specific RGB color to Pantone; you're mapping whole color layers, so your layer is displayed in #ffc72b on screen, but you're telling the printer that this particular layer is supposed to come out as Pantone 123. This is the exact same thing that happens when you select Pantone 123 in Photoshop after paying for the subscription, except the "telling the printer" part is embedded in PSD file in that case.

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

#89

Post by gwbas1c »

I smell a lawsuit.

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.

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

#90

Post by robertlagrant »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #43
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…

> 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.

Colours can be a standard. Nothing's stopping anyone standardising what Pantone do.
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