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I'm not sure how helpful this is? The service Pantone provides is not really a list of colors. It's the calibration of almost every printer and item that can cr

• Gare 4y ago
  But if there is a 1:1 mapping from Freetone to Pantone, shouldn't this still work? Crappy thing is that Pantone wants designers to pay for the ability to associate some area with a specific Pantone hue.
  • samwillis 4y ago
    Paying Pantone for the work they put into developing a calibrated colour system across printers, inks and sub-straits isn’t “crappy”. Adobe pulling a product feature from paid customers existing install/subscription because they failed to licence the feature properly from the supplier is crappy. Pantone is, in my option, being somewhat unduly attacked for this change. This is 100% on Adobes head. Pantone have been a popular punching bag for the design industry for 30 years. And it may be true they over charge for what they offer. But this is Adobes f*up. Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement. What I would love to see is a new “free”/libra/open colour system, superseding what Pantone offer. Let’s not just copy people because we feel slighted.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      They can and do charge for products related to actually making the colors. That doesn't mean they should get paid for which RGB code looks close. And the idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous.
      • lolinder 4y ago
        Pantone isn't copyrighting the colors, they're copyrighting the collection. It's similar to copyrighting a map: you're not claiming that all representations of this part of the world now belong to you, you're claiming that this representation belongs to you. It does seem like Adobe could have mapped the colors in existing files to a useful hex code instead of blacking them all out.
        • TAForObvReasons 4y ago
          The issue is that map from "named colors" to "useful colors" is sufficiently protected that approximations could run afoul of whatever agreement Adobe and Pantone have in place.
          • lolinder 4y ago
            Most likely, yes. There's a non-trivial amount of work that goes into ensuring that colors show up correctly in every medium, and Pantone will absolutely want to prevent other people from copying the mappings that they spent time and money developing. As OP said, though, that doesn't make them the bad guys. Adobe is the one who failed to take care of their customers.
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      • samwillis 4y ago
        > idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous Absolutely, however at least here in the UK (and I suspect the EU), copying the Pantone colour book would be classed as copying a “database”. Databases are copyrightable, whether you agree with that or not. My argument is rather than doing something that drags the copyright debate into to situation just make something better and “free as in beer and speech”. Copying something that is “copyright” to “free it” puts you on the back foot. You will loos the argument eventually.
        • Gare 4y ago
    • Gare 4y ago
      But aren't they already getting licensing fees from printer and color mixer manufacturers? Requiring someone to pay just to be able to specify "I want this thing painted with Pantone XYZ" sounds like double-dipping to me.
      • samwillis 4y ago
        They don’t require a license fee in order to specify an area as a specific colour. You could literally write it on as an instruction to your printer. I have literally done that. They charge Adobe for the right to include their database of colours in their software. Adobe failed to negotiate a sustainable relationship, and sold a product to customers under the pretence of including the Pantone database, then pulled it.
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    • anikom15 4y ago
      While it is Adobe’s fault for implementing really poorly, there has to be some blame on creators making works using the Pantone palette without really understanding what it’s for and the fact that it is licensed, presenting risk that it won’t necessarily be available in the future. A lot of people used the colors as just a nice useful palette. In hindsight that was never a good idea.
      • atoav 4y ago
        Are you sure about that? Most people I know who used Pantone colors were using them because their print product used one of those as a (special) spot color. You cannot print metallic copper on just any CMYK printer no matter how much you fiddle with the numbers. When you want a color to look as close as possible to a certain thing using a spot color (Pantone or otherwise) is the way to go.
        • anikom15 4y ago
          You just answered it yourself. Most people you know, what about the other people? What do they use it for? Not it’s intended use, whatever it is, which is part of my point (the other part is understanding the risk of vendor lock-in).
          • atoav 4y ago
            The other people don't use it at all. They use the color selector or the default swatches. I know no person who uses pantone seatches and does not know about spot colors. And my environment are self thought people not professional graphic designers.
    • atoav 4y ago
      I think you are overlooking the fact that Adobe is offering a subscription service. And one of the downsides of doing that is that organizations that license stuff to you (like Pantone) have a bigger leverage over you, because eevoking the license will remove their IP from all of the users, not just the ones with new versions of the software. Whithout having put any research into this at all, it would not surprise me if Pantone tried to use that lever.
      • samwillis 4y ago
        I’m sure that did, as any of us would in their position. Adobe should have anticipated this and ensures they had perpetual licensing in place. It’s ridiculous that the largest graphics technology company in the world have managed this so badly. Frankly I don't know why Adobe haven’t either acquired Pantone at some point in the past or developed their own alternative standard. It’s such a blind sport for them.
        • Kye 4y ago
          The company that owns Pantone is worth about $90 billion. It's more likely to go the other way.
          • samwillis 4y ago
            Danaher, their patent, is many times larger (and significantly more diverse) than Pantone which was acquired for $180m in 2007. Adobe should have acquired them then. Assuming no growth they would be worth around $250m now. Well within the reach of Adobe.
            • Kye 4y ago
              I'm referring to Danaher. My point is it's too late. They're not going to sell something that commands $10k for spindles of plastic chips. It prints money.
              • prvit 4y ago
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    • CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      > Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement. I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint (with the context that APIs are largely protected under fair use). Pantone should be compensated for what they do. They should have the option to recoup their costs but not necessarily by restricting others from using their published digital interface for colour-to-paint reproduction. They should be able to maintain IP rights for the tooling they build to faithfully reproduce those colours as paint and their trademark should obviously be protected but the actual colour codes themselves? How is that any different than say Google using the same API for Oracle's Java for their alternative JDK & JVM? At the end of the day in both cases, the useful part isn't the API/colour codes but the tech used to actually run Java/reproduce those colours faithfully as paint.
      • Jare 4y ago
        > I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint I would roughly say that Pantone is a specific arrangement of a set of specific items, with the arrangement intentionally conveying a unique meaning to the set. Just like a book or a picture or song or a piece of code. (IANAL, I don't intend that definition to stand up in courts, just describing how and why it makes sense to me that it could or should be treated the same way)
  • TheRealPomax 4y ago
    They want designers to pay for associating some area with a specific pantone code, not with "a hue" or "an rgb or cmyk color". The Adobe pallete is just a stand-in for the actual codes, so it's not about "they took away our colors", it's "they took away the mapping between what I'm working with and the pantone colors that get used when I actually send this off to a manufacturer" because what you pay for is Pantone's guarantee that if your product says it uses Pantone code X, it's going to look the same irrespective of who makes the physical thing, and irrespective of when you get it made. You use pantone when you need that guarantee, and you pay them for that. It's why their color libraries are so expensive: you don't get "neat colors", you get "if we say our product uses code X, on material Y, it's going to come out exactly like this". Not very similar, but exactly. Freetone can't do that. It's just a palette, and kind of completely misses the point. Using some nice colors is trivial, anyone can make a color palette. Pantone is not that.
    • CharlesW 4y ago
      > Freetone can't do that. It's just a palette, and kind of completely misses the point. For sure. Stuart Semple appears to be an expert when it comes to ink and printing, which makes this feel all the more disingenuous.
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      It's not missing the point. You'd still use pantone for actual printing. This exists so the colors don't show up as black while you're editing.
      • TheRealPomax 4y ago
        *some colors There's zero point in designing with Pantone if you're not going to use actual Pantone. Just use any palette (including this one) then.
      • anikom15 4y ago
        How do you know which Pantone color to specify when printing?
• nerdponx 4y ago
  The creator does have experience producing physical paints and pigments, so they are aware of the points you're making. The purpose here is not to replace Pantone entirely, but to be able to represent Pantone colors somewhat faithfully in digital documents. Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore. This is meant as an alternative.
  • kabes 4y ago
    > Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore This is wrong, you can still use the rgb approximations.
    • donatj 4y ago
      Sure, you can still use the colors, but they're removing the picker for them.
      • CuriousCosmic 4y ago
        They are also making it so anything that previously had the colour selected using the picker is set to black unless you pay them a licensing fee. There is obviously value in Pantone and what they do but the digital representation of Pantone's colours should be treated the same way APIs are.
    • Bjartr 4y ago
      But existing uses of Pantone colors will be appearing as black, not their RGB approximations, unless you pay $21/mo. from November on in Adobe products.
      • Angostura 4y ago
        What a ludicrous business decision
        • 4y ago
• Stamp01 4y ago
  It's a better alternative to the current experience of having existing projects practically held hostage. If you used Pantone colors previously, they now render as black until you either pay Pantone or install this.
  • oktwtf 4y ago
    What else should have been done? They are just named references to an external library. Now the library is no longer there due to licensing and a perpetual sans-ownership of the software. Seems like null data. Okay, what if they allow you to see the exact mix of that previous swatch so you can easily migrate away from the Pantone library entirely. That seems like a pretty poor way to handle a business relationship with the likes of Pantone, there would be 0 incentive at that point for someone to explore that (needed?) license on their own.
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    • stavros 4y ago
      They should have replaced the named references with the color they refer to. The value is in the reference, not the color. Pantone sells being able to say "Very Peri" in your PSD and having that being the same whether you're printing it, painting it, manufacturing it, whatever. Replacing it with #AABBCC doesn't hurt them, because there's no matching that can be done any more across materials.
• tomxor 4y ago
  > also things that can't be printed like metal and florescent colors. Actually those things can be printed with foils. You will find foils commonly printed onto a lot of consumer packaging on top of a laser printed base. Pedantic details aside, the manufacturers of the foils and vinyls to which you refer have their own unique colour/material collections that intersect pantone to some degree, and so they provide a separate "closest pantone" mapping. Given enough pressure I suspect they would adapt faster than pantone are gambling provided an obvious enough alternative.
• oliwarner 4y ago
  Which only adds to the confusion. Why are they charging a license on a product which feeds into people buying hard copies of colour charts, clip books and samples? That's where the money is. Babying the IP in software is cutting off broad usage. This will hurt sales.
• asdwda 4y ago